{"id":140693,"date":"2019-08-19T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2019-08-19T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=140693"},"modified":"2019-08-26T11:13:26","modified_gmt":"2019-08-26T10:13:26","slug":"dead-man-walking-the-return-of-the-federal-death-penalty-in-the-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/08\/dead-man-walking-the-return-of-the-federal-death-penalty-in-the-usa\/","title":{"rendered":"Dead Man Walking: The Return of the Federal Death Penalty in the USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

15 Aug 2019 – <\/em>On July 25, in a surprise announcement, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said that the federal government would be resuming executions, with five scheduled in the coming months. This overturns an effective moratorium on the federal death penalty that has lasted over 16 years. \u201cPunishment must be swift,\u201d Barr said. Just a week later, President Donald Trump exploited the mass killings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, by demanding not an assault weapons ban, but that capital punishment \u201cbe delivered quickly, decisively and without years of needless delay.\u201d Needless delay? Since 1973, over 160 wrongfully convicted people have been freed from death row.<\/p>\n

In fact, the death penalty is rapidly losing favor in the United States. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have banned executions, while four more states have formal moratoriums in place. Around the world, 106 countries have outlawed capital punishment, and another 28 either have moratoriums or don\u2019t carry out the death sentences. Trump\u2019s death penalty dictate is a tragic step backward.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not surprised that William Barr did this or the Trump administration wants to expedite federal executions,\u201d renowned anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean said on the \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d news hour. \u201cIt\u2019s their whole way of approaching everything: the way is through violence to try to solve social problems.\u201d Prejean is the Catholic nun who rose to global prominence in 1995 after her book \u201cDead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty\u201d was turned into an Oscar-winning film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.<\/p>\n

In her new memoir, \u201cRiver of Fire,\u201d Prejean eloquently describes the path that led her from a life as a semi-cloistered young nun in New Orleans in the 1960s to become one of the world\u2019s most celebrated and effective campaigners against capital punishment. In it, she writes, \u201cFrom years on the road talking with people in every state of this nation I realized that most folks have never reflected deeply about capital punishment and have almost no information about how the penalty actually works \u2014 or doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prejean co-founded a group, Survive<\/em>, that works with the families of murder victims. Bud Welch lost his daughter Julie in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which killed 168 people. Timothy McVeigh was later executed for the crime. Welch said on \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d: \u201cOne cannot go through the healing process at all when you\u2019re living with revenge. And that\u2019s all the death penalty is, revenge. It is not a deterrent. It doesn\u2019t, as the media says, bring closure to family members.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Death Penalty Information Center presents clear and compelling statistics on the 2,500 people currently on death row in the U.S., and how unjustly the death penalty is implemented. The most significant factors in determining whether or not a person is given the death penalty are the location where they are tried, whether they are poor, and the race of the victim. For example, over half of all death sentences are handed down in just 2% of U.S. counties. Similarly, over 75% of capital punishment cases involve murders where the victim was white. According to the DPIC, \u201cIn Louisiana, the odds of a death sentence were 97% higher for those whose victim was white than for those whose victim was black. Jurors in Washington state are three times more likely to recommend a death sentence for a black defendant than for a white defendant in a similar case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only is the death penalty administered in an unjust, biased way, but it is also irreversible. Death is final. Clifford Williams Jr. and Charles Ray Finch became the 165th and 166th death row prisoners to be exonerated. Each of these innocent African American men spent over 40 years on death row. With the expedited execution schedule fancied by Trump and Barr, they would have been long dead.<\/p>\n

Helen Prejean believes Trump and Barr \u201cseem to have no understanding about how the courts work. They can claim all they want that they\u2019re going to fast-track this and speed up these executions, but there is the Constitution, and there are the appeals.\u201d While her focus remains on grassroots organizing, she also points to the importance of dedicated death penalty defense attorneys.<\/p>\n

One such lawyer is Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. The group\u2019s Legacy Museum and the accompanying lynching memorial are deeply moving, documenting the 400-year history of African Americans, from enslavement to Jim Crow to the current crisis of mass incarceration.<\/p>\n

Said Stevenson on Democracy Now!, \u201cThe death penalty is lynching\u2019s stepson<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

15 Aug 2019 – U.S. Attorney General William Barr said that the federal government would be resuming executions, with five scheduled in the coming months. This overturns an effective moratorium on the federal death penalty that has lasted over 16 years. Since 1973, over 160 wrongfully convicted people have been freed from death row.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":66339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,139],"tags":[1356,651,985,70,126],"class_list":["post-140693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","category-justice","tag-death-penalty","tag-justice","tag-social-justice","tag-usa","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}