Death: Extreme Amerikan Injustice [This article appeared in a RAIL pamphlet against the prison system. --ed.] The death penalty shares with control units the designation as the most extreme form of punishment that the criminal "justice" system has to offer. As the pinnacle of repression, these two practices clearly expose the nationally oppressive character of Amerikan law and order. The death penalty is a symbolic act demanded by the capitalist state to publicly kill some of those who existence threaten order. In addition, the issue of the death penalty affirms group loyalty of the settler class and marginalizes "unpatriotic" liberals. Its extreme cruelty and lack of connection to stopping so-called crime shows that the death penalty is all about punishment of oppressed nationals and not about making a better society. While control units attempt to break the wills of oppressed nationals, the death penalty rallies the settler masses to higher levels of class solidarity. The death penalty has been proven a failure at deterring "crime," despite the attempts of reactionary researchers to prove the contrary. In a 1976 ruling, the United States Supreme Court found no conclusive evidence that the death penalty deters violent crime, and may in fact increase violent crime, as was the case in New York from 1903-1963.(2) But 75% of white Amerikans support it anyway.(2) Some advance the liberal line that Amerikans just don't have adequate information. But that's not it. The death penalty, like the rest of the criminal justice system, has nothing to do with stopping so-called crime, but everything to do with stopping the oppressed nations. Amerika's long history of extrajudicial lynching aside, the death penalty is only applied after a long legal process: not fair, but legal. At each stage -- arrest, arraignment, conviction, sentencing and appeals including all of their sub steps -- the criminal injustice system manages to further concentrate oppressed nationals and filter out whites. There are currently over 2200 people on death row in Amerika, and Blacks alone account for 54% of all legal executions since 1930.(3) Blacks are only 12% of the U.S. population. The criminal injustice system deems crimes against whites by oppressed nations a higher priority in arraignments, prosecutions and seeking and applying the death penalty than if the victim is non-white. In Texas, Blacks who kill whites are six times more likely to receive the death sentence than if the victim is Black. In Florida, Black offenders who are accused of killing whites are 40 times more likely than whites who kill Blacks to end up on death row.(1) While the television news media makes a big deal out of relatively rare drive-by-shootings or cop killings, this pales in comparison to the starvation deaths of 14 million children each year.(5) The imperialists thrive on such oppression but aren't prosecuted, because the laws, from authorship to execution, are thoroughly in their own hands. We can see the disparity between the laws in practice and the laws in books by looking at street crime. Are the laws enforced equally? No. Since 1930, 89% of the 455 men executed for rape have been Black.(6) What makes the death penalty particularly sinister is the fact that it's irreversible. Great Britain abolished the death penalty in 1969 when it was discovered that two innocent people were executed.(1) In the United States, at least 50 people have been found innocent once put on death row. Some defenders of executions say to this "See, the system works, they got appeals!" In these 50 cases, they were lucky. How many innocent people are killed and evidence of their innocence is never discovered? Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrant anarchists framed and executed for murder in Boston in 1927. In the 1980s Massachusetts Governor Dukakis admitted that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused and executed for espionage. The evidence is still pretty sketchy about Julius, but even the National Security Agency, with its stolen(!) Russian documents admits that Ethel Rosenberg was innocent. It's only public knowledge that Sacco, Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs were framed because they were officially political and movements fought for them and their memory long after they were dead. Now, poor Blacks on death row don't have enough people and money to defend themselves on appeals, let alone for decades after they are executed. Amerikan Nationalism Demands Violence Even by the state's own criteria of what one can do to one's enemies, the death penalty is often ""cruel and unusual" punishment. There have been many cases of botched executions. For example, an inmate was tortured earlier this year when he was strapped to a table so tightly that the lethal injection was prevented from flowing into his veins because of blocked circulation. Eventually the pigs realized this and loosened the straps and the person died. In addition, there have been cases where the first burst of electricity failed to kill, often because of poor procedure, and multiple bursts were required to kill, causing pain and suffering that technically doesn't exist in a "normal" execution. Executions used to be public but the crowds proved unable to control themselves. This often led "to violence among the crowds and senseless tragedy for a few unfortunate victims. The last public execution in Amerika was on August 14, 1936 in Kentucky. Nearly 20,000 people showed up to watch the hanging death of Rainey Bethea, a Black man accused of raping a white woman"(8). Vendors sold lemonade and the saloons were opened. The crowd became an unruly rioting mass. The number of white people hurt in this incident led Kentucky to ban public hanging for rape offenders. Apparently kentucky didn't trust it's white citizens to behave "civilly" and not hurt each other during barbaric executions of Black men. Lynch mobs, like the death penalty today, served to rally the white settler class together. For the period from 1878 to 1898 alone anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells estimated that 10,000 blacks were lynched. Lynchings continued although in slowly declining numbers until 1964.(9) Sixty years ago it was lemonade stands, now it's barbecue parties, or in the case of the planned execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, "black-out" parties to preserve electricity for the actual execution. Notes: 1. Amnesty International "The Death Penalty: Cruel and Inhuman Punishment" pamphlet. 2. Gallup, 1985, in Saga of Shame. Quixote Center. PO Box 5206, Hyattsville MD. 3. Saga of Shame, p.2, 4-5. 5. Ruth Sivard, World Military and Health Expenditures 1987-8. p.25. 6. Saga of Shame, p.5 8. William J. Bowers, Legal Homicide, and Guerillas in Tha Mist 9. From The African-American Encyclopedia, Vol 4. p.1000. Williams, Michael W., ed. 1993.