Where are the African-American families?
Capital punishment is popular is America. It is clear that many Americans experience a demented kind of euphoric high when a prisoner has been put to death. Alas, the macabre hypocrisy of it all! We should not be surprised when most frequently it is a large number of Caucasian-Americans standing outside the prisoner's execution chamber cheering the torture-filled ending of, as often as not, yet another African-American life.
Conversely, and equally worthy of note, there is just as frequently a small but quiet number of Caucasian-Americans who oppose the execution — or slaughter, forced death or whatever one chooses to call it. A forced termination of a human life is still murder, no matter how clinical it's made to sound.
Unless there is an obvious presumption of innocence surrounding the African-American who is about to be executed, there tend to be few, if any, cries of outrage from the African-American community. I have noticed of late, that on those rare occasions when the African-American community does vocally object to and actively oppose the state-sanctioned murder of one of its members, it is almost always a few days before the murder is carried out.
As an African-American, who has also been sentenced to death, this writer finds the latter at once unsettling and absurd: "Unsettling" because of the number of African-Americans who actively and vocally fight for the abolition of capital punishment are so few, that this writer often asks himself, "Where were these brothers and sisters during the 10 or 15 years before the week in which the execution is scheduled?" "Absurd" because one wonders why the few who are active and vocal wait until the last minute (so to speak) to get active and vocal.
Many of the immediate family members of the African-American men, women and children who are on death rows seem to be at best complacent about their family members' lives. It is as if they do not care and/or they think the sentences of death are not real and will never be carried out.
It is not as if they do not know that per capita, the death sentence is sought and carried out against African-Americans with far more frequency than it is sought and carried out against Caucasian-Americans.
It is not as if they do not know that most often — especially in the US south — it is the racist prosecutors who seek and obtain death sentences via the illegal empanelling of all-white juries, to the total exclusion of black jurors.
It is not as if they do not know prosecutors lie, and police agencies work in concert with such prosecutors to manufacture evidence against capital defendants.
It is not as if they do not know how prosecutors and police hide evidence that could prove the innocence of a defendant, or, even on those rare occasions when they did not hide it, a racist judge would not allow it to be presented or heard in open court.
They do know all these things.
Perhaps Green Left readers will clip this article and send it to their African-American friends, and upon its receipt our black brothers and sisters will join us all in the struggle against capital punishment.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]