by Kevin Cooper.
I am a poor African American, innocent man on death row in America. These are three very important matters that the United States Supreme Court doesn’t acknowledge when it comes to the fairness or unfairness of capital punishment, even though these matters are, for the most part, intertwined, especially race and class. I have come to the conclusion that not only does there need to be, at the very least, a moratorium on the death penalty and its outright abolition, there also needs to be a moratorium on racism, classism, sexism, and all the other real life issues that are having a negative effect on the minority people of this country and are not acknowledged by the majority people of this country.
Concerning the death penalty in America; its enforcers and supporters say that this is the best and fairest criminal justice system in the world. But how can this be the truth when only America’s poor are sent to death rows across this country and are the ones who are actually executed? When African Americans, who make up 13% of the country’s population as a whole, and Black males make up less than half in that 13%, are damn near 40% or more of America’s death row population?
When it comes to innocence, the number of human beings that have been and still are being exonerated damn near every day, after having spent years, and in some cases decades, in prisons, and this includes death row. This is mind boggling, astonishing, astounding, and outright unbelievable, especially when it’s the very people who the United States Supreme Court refuses to acknowledge are the ones who are being exonerated. All are poor and most are minorities. Yes, a moratorium needs to be put in place until these people in power start to acknowledge what’s going on.
If they do start to acknowledge the truth, then they can’t, in good faith, have a death penalty in America. No one expects a perfect system, if truth be told you can never have a perfect system that is run by human beings. But it’s not too much to ask for a fair system, is it? A system that comes to terms with the truth about just how much and how negatively issues like racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, religious prejudice, every other type of negative stereotype affects people, especially in matters of such importance as life and death. We most definitely need a moratorium, and we need one now. Until we do, this country will continue to be the Divided States of America, and it will continue to lock up its poor, execute its poor, and never acknowledge that classism is alive and well in the 21st century in America.
This is definitely true for Black and Brown people, whose whole history, to a large extent in this country, is that of being locked up and murdered by the system each and every year since the very first, when they made contact with people who were willing to kill them just because they could. America truly needs a time-out and a moratorium will do that. In struggle from death row, San Quentin Prison in California, I’m Kevin Cooper.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
