Oppose rulers’ use of death penalty!

The Obama Justice Department’s successful effort to secure the death penalty for white supremacist Dylann Storm Roof is part of the rulers’ attempt to divide the working class, to erode democratic rights and to prepare the way for more attacks on working people here and in other countries.

“A death verdict for Roof strengthens the repressive powers of the state, and gives it the false aura of justice,” said Mumia Abu-Jamal Dec. 22 on Prison Radio. “My opposition is unequivocal.” Abu-Jamal, whose own death sentence on frame-up charges was overturned in 2011 as a result of an international defense campaign, couldn’t be more right.

Opposing the capitalist government’s use of the death penalty is a class question. The propertied rulers took advantage of the abhorrence workers feel for Roof’s 2015 cold-blooded terrorist massacre of nine African-American parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, to try to give a facelift to one of their weapons against the working class.

Roof, whose middle name evokes the memory of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi storm troopers, is clearly a true believer. He openly states his support for the Ku Klux Klan, calls Hitler “a saint,” and believes “Jews are indeed our enemy.”

But the rulers’ target in imposing the death penalty is neither Roof nor white supremacy, it’s the revolutionary fighting potential of the working class.

“The U.S. rulers and their government have begun to fear the working class,” Socialist Workers Party leader Steve Clark explained in the introduction to The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes. They “recognize that more and more working people are beginning to see that the bosses and their political parties have no ‘solutions’ that don’t further load the costs — monetary and human — of the crisis of their system on us.” The capitalist rulers and well-paid professionals who serve them “sense that mounting struggle — class struggle — lies ahead.

The capitalists and their government use the death penalty to intimidate political activists and working people. They want to put a damper on growing opposition to the death penalty, increased protests against police killings and opposition to the mass incarceration that has mushroomed under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Working people should oppose every move that strengthens their hand, including the death sentence for Roof.

Related articles:
Attica censorship ‘a danger to all who care about freedom’
Fight prison censorship
Prisoners in UK protest inhuman conditions
Mumia Abu-Jamal wins fight for medical care behind bars
US prison population drops to 10-year low

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