What Are They Scared Of?
By Kevin Cooper
Whenever the words “moratorium” or “abolition” are spoken around pro-death penalty politicians and their supporters, they act like they are about to have a heart attack. What is it about the words “end the death penalty” that makes these people act and sound just the plantation owners and the slave masters who heard that their way of life was not acceptable to the rest of the world?
Out here in California people are starting to talk about studying the fairness of the death penalty, and the people who support it are starting to panic. They held a press conference in early January 2006 to show their continued support for capital punishment and their opposition to a study on it. But what they really showed was just how racist and classist they are. All of the people at the press conference were white people, and they were all middle class, except the politicians who were with them, who were ruling class—all the middle and upper class white people getting together to show their collective support for capital punishment.
What was so surprising was that the bill to allow the study had not even been passed, it was only to be debated, and yet these people were already scared. They even stated that this might be the beginning of the end of the death penalty in this state, the first step in ending it.
But if the death penalty is as necessary as they claim, and applied as fairly as they say it is, they wouldn’t have anything to worry about. The study would and should happen, and then things could go back to the way they are now and have been since the death penalty was renewed in the late 1970s. The problem is, it is not as necessary or fair as they claim. A news poll states that 68 percent of the people in this state support the death penalty. I wonder if those 68 percent support the death penalty for all people, or just for the poor people who end up receiving it?
Did they ask that question when they took the poll? Did they ask people: “Do you support the fact that no rich person has ever been executed?” If not, why not? What are they scared of? Most of the conservative Republicans who support the death penalty are unrelenting. No matter how many studies—like the ones in Maryland and Illinois (and soon in California)—show the racist, classist, arbitrary nature of capital punishment, they are unsympathetic, even when it comes to acknowledging proven problems in the system—like the possibility of killing innocent people.
Maybe proven imbalances and problems in the system of capital punishment in this country are what they are afraid of talking about. We all know that this system cannot be fixed. Human error is unavoidable, and prejudice and the hatred it produces will not allow for an honest system of capital punishment. We all know that there is no humane way to legally murder another human being. We all know that the truth keeps being exposed about the death penalty within this country and that, consequently, more and more people are starting to turn against this crime against humanity.
Maybe they do have real reasons to be scared after all! But another question must now be asked. How many poor people are going to be murdered at the hands of the state before this system is at they very least studied, and at the most ended?
The truth will make certain people scared, but history is our guide to how the rest of the people will react. When the real truth about slavery was found out—not the one-sided truth that the slave master told, but the truth from the mouths of the slaves—the system of slavery began to come apart. I would like to think that the same thing can happen with the death penalty because the time has come for it to be ended!
Throughout this country’s existence, certain people at certain times have had to do things that they and their kind did not want to do, regardless of the fact that it was for the betterment of human kind. This is what must be the case with death penalty in this state, and in this country. The people—the majority of U.S. citizens—who do not have an interest in the killing of poor people by the state must force those in power to give up their favorite toy. It makes all Americans look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world. So much so that this government is the laughingstock of the world and can no longer go around telling others how to live and what to do about human rights and all the rest that it does as long as it refuses to give up the racist and classist penalty of death. Not many other countries pay this country any mind any more—unless the U.S. military has its guns trained on them. This country is not the rule to follow, it’s the exception to the rule!
The rule is that whenever a country reaches a certain level of development—a certain level of humanity—they give up the things that make a people inhumane. Like the death penalty. I guess the good thing about ending certain things is that they seem never to come back because once they’re gone people realize how little they are needed. So maybe that’s another reason those people are scared!
In Struggle from Death Row
At San Quentin Prison,
Kevin Cooper