BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
Varnall Weeks, who prosecution and defense experts alike agreed was mentally ill, was executed May 12, 1995, in Alabama. Weeks was the ninth Black inmate among the 12 people put to death by the state of Alabama since it reinstated capital punishment in 1983.
The capitalist rulers have begun cranking up their legalized murder machine. There are more than 3,000 inmates on death row across the country. Since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976, 284 people have been executed. There have been 27 executions carried out in the United States so far this year, an average of one a week. New York became the 38th state to legalize capital punishment March 7 of this year.
In a report issued Jan. 14, 1995, Amnesty International accused the U.S. government of executing innocent and mentally ill people. It stated that more than 50 mentally ill or impaired prisoners have been executed in the United States since 1982.
Horace Grant, a 28-year-old Black man, was still alive nine minutes after the first throw of the switch to the electric chair he was strapped to in Atmore, Alabama, July 14, 1989. After 19 minutes and a second jolt of current he was pronounced dead. Grant became the first person executed in the United States after the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for mentally retarded prisoners earlier that year.
Girvies Davis, who was given three lethal chemical injections on May 17, was convicted on confessions the cops claim he offered to make in a written note to his jailers. The prosecutor admitted the note was written by someone else.
Davis suffered brain damage in childhood and had been considered mentally retarded. He was illiterate at the time of his arrest - a fact not made known to jurors - and was taken on a late night ride by the police to an isolated spot where they removed his handcuffs. The cops made him an offer: try running away, or sign the papers presented to him.
The Supreme Court struck down all existing death penalty statutes in 1972, on the heels of the titanic struggles of Blacks for civil rights and in the midst of the mass movement against the Vietnam War. Almost immediately state governments began passing death penalty laws to get around the Court's reinterpretation of the Eighth Amendment, which bars "cruel and unusual punishment." While campaigning for the reinstitution of the death penalty in 1972, then California governor Ronald Reagan cynically stated, "I think there is cruelty when you execute a chicken to have a Sunday dinner."
On July 2, 1976, the Supreme Court declared that the death penalty does not violate the Constitution after all.
Gary Gilmore, convicted of murder in Utah, was the first person to be executed in more than a decade - by a firing squad - Jan. 17, 1977. The killing of Gilmore set a precedent and dealt a setback to the long struggle to do away with this barbaric form of punishment.
Racist character of death penalty
According to the National Data Book from the U.S.
Department of Commerce, from 1930 to 1991 there were 4,016
people executed. Of the executed inmates, 2,129 were
Black - 53 percent. More than 40 percent of inmates on death
row are Black, more than three times the Black percentage of
the population. Almost 40 percent of the 284 people killed
since 1976 were Blacks.
Rep. Don Edwards of California issued a report entitled "Racial Disparities in Federal Death Penalty Prosecutions." The report states, "Since 1988, 33 of the 37 federal death penalty prosecutions - including all of those approved by Attorney General Janet Reno" - involved oppressed nationalities. Nearly 90 percent of the men executed in the states for the crime of rape since 1930 have been Black.
A humane way to kill?
Proponents of the death penalty attempt to burnish some
of its barbarity with the introduction of lethal injection.
"It's the tamest violence you can imagine, because there's
no bruising , there's no force, there's no physical
restriction of the airways," asserted Robert Johnson,
chairman of Justice, Law and Society at American University.
Twenty-six states now inject, up from four in 1980. Doctors
are included on execution teams, supposedly to ensure
efficiency.
An Arkansas medical team needed 45 minutes to put away Ricky Rector, a mentally disabled man, in 1992. Soon-to-be U.S. president Bill Clinton flew home from campaigning in New Hampshire to be present for the execution.
Willie Turner, who was executed by lethal injection in May of this year, was scheduled to die six times in his 15 years on death row in Virginia. He argued that the repeated trips to the "death house" violated the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
"Two times the guards have gone out of their way to show me the electric chair," Turner wrote in his unpublished autobiography, My Times in the Death House. "As your date gets closer, the execution squad practices more and more. They test the electric chair. Because it is in the room right next door, I could hear it crack and hum." Turner described the "sickening odor of burnt flesh and disinfectant" as inmates were being electrocuted.
Weapon against fighting workers
In 1934, mass strikes that involved 700,000 workers
paved the way for the organization of the industrial unions
and the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO).
The single year record of 199 executions was set in 1935, during the Great Depression. In that decade 1,667 people were put away - accounting for 41 percent of all executions from 1930 to 1991. Franklin Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, was president for the rest of the 1930s and led the United States into the slaughter of World War II.
As if anticipating similar class battles ahead, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan anti-crime bill February 8 that deepens the assault on workers' rights. One of the measures in the bill restricts the rights of inmates to file habeas corpus appeals. If signed into law the bill would give inmates six months to file in the federal court and limit them to a single petition. Clinton's 1994 crime bill expands the death penalty to about 60 federal offenses, while Congress seeks to make it easier for jurors to impose the death penalty.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate passed the Comprehensive Terrorism Prevention Act of 1995 on June 7. The bill would give most death row inmates one year from their conviction to appeal their sentences in Federal court and limit them to one appeal. "This bill goes far beyond terrorism and far beyond federal prisoners," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Democrat who voted for the bill.