In order to more quickly execute death row prisoners, Georgia
prison officials bypassed state and federal law and contacted
overseas importers to have lethal-injection drugs shipped directly to
the Georgia Department of Corrections. (New York Times, April 14)
Other extralegal means of acquiring lethal injection drugs have also
been revealed through lawsuits brought on behalf of death row
prisoners.
The suits expose that a “culture of premeditated deception”
exists between prisons that have formed networks and eagerly “share”
and “swap” lethal injection drugs with one another, often free of
charge. A prison in Arizona went so far as to re-label imported
packaging of these drugs as being “For Veterinary Purposes” in
order to avoid close scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration,
the Drug Enforcement Administration and port inspectors in Phoenix.
Even though the commercial media and both political parties
promote capital punishment as an alleged deterrent to crime,
especially violent crime, in reality it does nothing to reduce the
levels of violent crimes. It is, however, a legal way for the ruling
class to kill poor and working-class people, especially African
Americans and Latinos. Rarely if ever do wealthy defendants receive
the death penalty. The death penalty is a legal, modern version of
lynching by the capitalist state.
Comparing the death penalty to legalized lynching is more than
simply a dramatic analogy. States that historically lynched the most
people now execute the most prisoners, according to David Jacobs,
author of “The Political Sociology of the Death Penalty,” an
article in the February 2002 American Sociological Review. Jacobs
makes the case that the death penalty has become a “legal
replacement” for lynching.
The original purpose of lynching was to terrorize an oppressed
community and to intimidate its members from organizing for their
equal rights. It was especially common in the post-Reconstruction
South after the Civil War, but continued through the mass civil
rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Likewise, the death penalty,
the ultimate form of punishment administered by the state, serves as
a means of terrorizing poor and working people.
How many working and oppressed people sit on death row today,
falsely convicted of crimes they did not commit? How many have lost
their lives to the death penalty because they lacked the resources to
fight their case through the legal system? Only intensified struggle
can stop state-sanctioned killing. Abolishing the death penalty would
take away one of the main tools of terror used by the capitalist
state to hold down the working class.
