Texas activists mobilize for annual march

“With the holiday season five weeks away, early birds are counting shopping days. Texas is counting execution days,” says Elizabeth Ann Stein, producer of Execution Watch, a Houston radio show aired live from 6 to 7 pm on www.KPFT.org on days when executions are scheduled to take place.

”Between now and Nov. 20, the busiest death chamber in the United States will give lethal injections to 10 men. During one three-day period, a prisoner will be executed each day,” posted Stein on the radio show’s blog at www.executionwatch.org/blog.

If these executions are carried out, this will bring to 21 the Texas total for people being put to death in 2008.

It has been five years since Texas executed anyone during the month of December.

In 2003 the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement called two December executions to the attention of the public and the media. The TDPAM stated that it was “horrifying to stand in front of the death house and protest executions while a large holiday display flashing red and green lights on the tall brick walls surrounding the Huntsville Prison Unit announced, ‘We Wish Your Family a Happy Holiday Season.’”

Since then, there have been no executions during or after “Thanksgiving,” Christmas and New Year’s Day.

On Oct. 25 Texas abolitionists will gather in Houston for the 9th Annual March to End Executions. The honored guest speaker will be one of nine people exonerated off Texas death row, Clarence Brandley.

Brandley, an African American, spent close to 10 years in Huntsville for a crime he did not commit. When the sheriffs picked up Brandley and another man for questioning about a murder, they told the two men, “One of you all’s going to pay for this. Since you’re the n - - - - r, your elected,” Brandley recounts.

Since his release in 1991, Brandley continues to speak out about the injustice of the death penalty, always commenting that if President Clinton had passed the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act while he was in prison, he would have been executed instead of speaking out.

The theme of the 9th annual march is “The Death Penalty—Guilty on All Counts! Shut It Down.” Speakers will focus on how the death penalty targets the poor and people of color, including how innocent people are executed through state misconduct and the Law of Parties, which allows the death penalty to be applied to accomplices in murder cases.

The march will be led by Texas’s newest abolition organization, Kids Against the Death Penalty, formed by the family of Jeff Wood, an innocent man sent to death row under the Law of Parties. Wood received a stay of execution in August hours before his date with death. His large family and supporters built a support campaign and the Texas governor granted the stay until next spring.

Dozens of family members of those on death row will speak, some coming from as far away as the Rio Grande Valley. Connie Wright, the wife of Greg Wright, who is scheduled to be executed five days after the march despite evidence of innocence, will also be featured.

Spoken word artist and Chicana activist, Dee!Colonize, will educate and entertain the rally with her original words about capital punishment as well as sharing the words of some poets on death row.

The SHAPE Center Council of Elders will march behind the Kids, and the Free Radicals Marching Band will provide a lively beat to accompany the chants.

Since executions resumed this past May after an eighth-month pause while the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of lethal injections, there have been 27 executions in the U.S. One hundred percent have been in the South, including 11 in Texas, four in Virginia and three in Georgia.

The writer is a TDPAM organizer.