Within three weeks of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ending a seven-month moratorium on lethal injections, 14 execution dates were set.
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“We’ll start playing a little bit of catch-up,” said William R. Hubbarth, a spokesperson for a right-wing, pro-death penalty organization based in Houston, Texas. Russ Willard, spokesperson for Georgia State Attorney General Thubert E. Baker, said that the state seeks a “clearance of the backlog.” (New York Times, May 3)
The Supreme Court had issued a moratorium on executions while it considered whether the chemical formula used for lethal injection in Kentucky inflicted enough pain to qualify as cruel and unusual punishment, which would have made it unconstitutional. The court ended the moratorium on a 7-to-2 vote this past April, ruling that death by lethal injection did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
The ruling was the go-ahead that death-penalty states had been waiting for. Texas, which accounted for 26 of the 42 executions nationwide in 2007, is leading the surge in execution dates, with five inmates scheduled to die in its Walls unit between June 3 and Aug. 20. (New York Times, May 3)
The death penalty is a weapon used almost exclusively against poor and working-class people in the United States. In particular, it has been used as a form of modern-day lynching against African Americans.
The case of Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis is a textbook example. Davis, 38, is an innocent African American convicted in 1991 of killing a white police officer in Savannah. Davis has always claimed his innocence, surrendering himself to authorities back in 1989 to prove his case in court.
Davis learned firsthand the institutionalized racism deeply embedded in the justice system. In Georgia, one is 4.5 times more likely to be sentenced to death if convicted of killing a white person than if convicted of killing a Black person.
Davis’s conviction relied on no physical evidence. The prosecution, which relied on witness testimony, never produced the murder weapon. Seven out the nine witnesses recanted and even contradicted their testimony during the trial. The witnesses also alleged coercion by police.
One witness is quoted as saying, “The police were telling me that I was an accessory to murder and that I would go to jail for a long time … especially because a police officer got killed. … I was only 16 and was so scared of going to jail.”
Major cuts in Georgia’s legal defense resources meant that only two lawyers were to represent 160 people on death row, including Davis at a moment when critical work was needed the most. In 1996 Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, increasing restrictions for appeals in an already difficult system.
Davis is just one of the many working-class death row convicts who have been denied justice. Activists and progressives must continue to expose the racist, anti-worker character of the death penalty. Abolishing capital punishment would be a major victory for all workers in the struggle against oppression.
