Forum calls for end to racist death penalty

Student workers had to keep setting up chairs as the crowd swelled to over 250 in the University of Toledo Student Union on Oct. 29. The program was the last in a 10-stop tour called “Witness to an Execution,” organized by the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. Community members of all ages and nationalities mixed with students to hear Barbara Becnel, long-time friend of the late Stanley Tookie Williams and editor of his books.

Conveners of the program called for a moratorium on the death penalty because it is racist, targets the poor, is barbaric and doesn’t deter crime. In addition, it murders the innocent.

Washington Muhammad from the Nation of Islam expressed Minister Louis Farrakhan’s support for Imam Siddique Abdullah Hasan, one of the Lucasville 5 wrongly convicted for the death of a guard in connection with a 1993 prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio. He declared that the conviction of Imam Hasan was due to “fear of a warrior” and “fear that we might unite across racial boundaries, economical boundaries and religious boundaries.”

Hasan was an imam, or prayer leader, for the Sunni Muslims in the Lucasville prison and their spokesperson before and during the rebellion, which led the prosecution to target him for capital crimes.

Hasan sent a taped statement from death row. A judge on Aug. 14 recommended denial of his petition for habeas corpus and request for an evidentiary hearing. Hasan’s attorneys filed objections to the recommendations and the ACLU filed a friend of the court brief. However, Hasan may be nearing the end of his appeals at the federal level.

The tape pointed out that prosecutors played to anti-Islamic prejudice and racism in his trial. As an illustration of the racism of the death penalty, Hasan quoted statistics that 80 percent of executions are for killing whites, whereas only 13 percent are for killing Black people.

Hasan stated, “We have to strive, to struggle to bring about change in the criminal justice system, just like the people of Toledo stopped the neo-Nazis from marching. Join forces. It’s going to be a long road.” (See “Nazis kicked out of Toledo,” Oct. 18, 2005, and “Cops defend Nazis as hundreds protest,” Dec. 15, 2005, at www.workers.org.)

The audience then warmly greeted featured speaker Becnel, who had been present at the execution of Tookie Williams on Dec. 13, 2005. She was also a witness at a hearing to determine if something was wrong with the way the State of California had carried out Williams’ execution.

According to Becnel, the California standard is that “some pain is okay but excruciating pain is unconstitutional.” She stated, “I knew that Stan had been tortured to death. When I came out and spoke my truth, they said I was hysterical. They said, ‘Don’t believe untutored eyes.’ ”

This is the first time in the history of San Quentin prison that a federal judge ordered an execution team to testify under oath. By the end of the first day of testimony, it was admitted that the execution was “bungled.”

Becnel related the testimony of a veterinarian at the September hearing who stated that the protocol used by the State of California is a process he would never use to euthanize an animal. Asked why not, he answered, “Because I have ethics. I have standards. I wouldn’t do something that would cause the animal pain.”

The hearing revealed that the state of California uses a “three-drug cocktail” to kill. The first drug makes the prisoner lose consciousness instantly, but it has a rapid half-life, losing its potency in two to three minutes. The botched process that Williams was subjected to took 10 minutes, allowing him to regain consciousness.

The second drug is a paralytic agent, affecting all parts of the body, including the lungs. The veterinarian at the hearing stated there is no medical purpose for this drug. “Its purpose is to fool everybody in the audience.” As his consciousness returned, Williams’ inability to breathe “was like someone was choking him to death.”

The third drug provokes a heart attack. With returning consciousness, Williams was forced to experience the severe pain of the heart attack. In Becnel’s words, “It was a torture. It was a murder.”

Becnel summarized, “We’re waiting to hear if the judge will rule that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment. But we already knew that it was.”

“We have an opportunity to unravel the death penalty. Let us all come together. Stop the injustice, inhumanity and immorality of the death penalty.”

Activists in Ohio plan to step up the fight to free the Lucasville Five.

In a recent letter from death row to Workers World Party’s Cleveland branch, Hasan declared, “I am committed to ending this racist and barbaric practice which targets the poor, so look for us to make an immense amount of political and revolutionary noise in Ohio.”