>>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 08/02/01 01:56PM >>> URGENT ACTION NEEDED TO SAVE THE LIFE OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL The attempted state execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal exemplifies everything that is wrong with capital punishment in this country, especially its racist nature as the most barbaric act of a legal system pervaded by racial inequality and social injustice. The growing use of the death penalty has to be met with increasing pressure and renewed resistance to stop the killing of Mumia and to grant a new trial now. The execution of Timothy McVeigh has increased the peril to Mumia Abu-Jamal. The first federal execution in 35 years, followed almost immediately by the second (Juan Raul Garza), will be manipulated to justify capital punishment, to condition the public to accept increased use of the barbaric death penalty. McVeigh, Garza, and the racist death penalty With the passing of a few months, we can look at the meaning of the McVeigh execution with some distance. Like Garza, McVeigh admitted his guilt. McVeigh was unlike Garza in every other respect, however. Held up by Attorney General John Ashcroft as the "prime example" to justify capital punishment, McVeigh held himself as a hero fighting against corrupt governmental forces - he viewed his own execution as "state-assisted suicide". Politicians and major news media repeatedly asserted that the Oklahoma City bombing was the greatest act of terrorism committed on American soil. The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism have no sympathy for McVeigh's actions; we denounce that act of brutal terrorism. It was a horrible and unconscionable act that no rational person could defend. However, it is important to place the act in historical perspective, as doing so sheds light on the racist and classist nature of the death penalty in this country. The greatest act of terrorism on American soil claim is refuted by the countless, vicious eradications of Native American villages and peoples in our country's past (and, one could argue, that still continues, but in less overtly brutal ways). In the early part of this century, an entire town of African American citizens in Oklahoma was systematically and methodically disappeared by whites from surrounding towns, through lynchings, shootings, and burnings. In more recent news, cost cutbacks at Ford and Firestone have been responsible for unknown numbers (some estimates in the hundreds) of highway fatalities. Who mourns for all these victims? Who brings justice for their deaths? Why are these not considered capital crimes? Could it be that the decisions for who faces a capital trial and therefore who is punished or not, who is killed by the state or not, are determined by the same power structures that have nurtured and been nurtured by those terrorist acts throughout this nation's history? McVeigh was one of the few Caucasians on federal death row - one of the many ways in which he was an atypical death row inmate. At the time of his execution, over 75% of the inmates on federal death row were African American and Latino (similar percentages of minority death row inmates exist on state death rows across the country). John Ashcroft apparently studied these numbers and came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of racial bias in the federal death penalty system (he also had commented that the death penalty was the best way to show our respect for life, in regards to the McVeigh execution). Rational people know better. Capital punishment in inescapably racist and the end product of a racist judicial system that routinely robs people of color of their basic constitutional rights to a fair trial and to equal justice. The fight continues, and must be strengthened, to save Mumia. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist and broadcaster, has been an articulate and persistent foe of police brutality and racist injustice since he was a youth - and thus has been the target for police revenge. His trial for the killing of a police officer was marked by more than 30 instances of outrageous unfairness. These include perjured testimony, false claims of a "confession", eleven peremptory challenges that knocked almost all African Americans off the jury, the withholding of vital evidence from the defense, and the barring of Mumia from his own trial for protesting an unprepared court-appointed attorney (poorly-prepared and grossly under-funded public defenders have been a major factor in the composition of death rows across the country, with numerous cases in Texas appearing in the news in the past two years). The renewed frenzy of federal and state executions arises against growing confirmation, through new technologies, that innocent people are being put to death or are presently on death rows across the country. Why is this happening at this moment? We are now seeing the consequences of globalization of capital, dismantling of industries, weakening of unions, massive loss of decent living-wage jobs, gutting of welfare services, crises in health care, education, and housing - all of which have fallen heaviest on people of color. Institutional racism, always a fundamental factor in our society, has qualitatively deepened and further marginalized young African Americas and Latinos in the first place as a result of structural changes in the economy wrought by globalization. The police killing of Timothy Thomas in Cincinnati brought an eruption of anger in the Black community grounded in economic despair marked by 43 percent unemployment in a city where joblessness among whites runs at around 4 percent. The accelerating use of capital punishment is inseparable from the "shoot-first" reactions of police, courts, and government to that anger and resistance. CCDS calls for renewed, urgent action to save Mumia Abu-Jamal's life and to help generate increased public outcry for a new trial. We ask the Attorney General of Pennsylvania to join with the defense in the motion for a new trial for Mumia, and to make public and available to the defense all new and previously withheld evidence. CCDS calls for an immediate moratorium on the death penalty - federal and state - and for the ultimate abolition of capital punishment in this country. America should join the rest of the civilized world in abolishing the death penalty. Statement issued by: Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism 11 John Street, Room 506, New York, NY 10038 Phone: (212) 233-7151 FAX: (212) 233-7063 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] website: www.cofc.org
