... and in Uganda

MVFHR members Bill Pelke and Bill Babbitt are traveling in Uganda with The Journey of Hope this week, speaking out against the death penalty at various events. They are there at the invitation of Journey of Hope member Mpagi Edward Edmary, who spent 18 years on Uganda's death row for a crime he did not commit.

The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty reports that there were many events in African countries honoring World Day Against the Death Penalty yesterday:

One of the bigger events is the ‘Regional Conference on the Abolition and/or Moratorium on the Execution of the Death Penalty’ organised by the Government of Rwanda with Hands Off Cain and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, to be held in Kigali. The conference will have participants from at least 24 different African countries and representatives from the European Union and African Union. According to the organisers, “The conference aims to launch a major debate on the need to abolish the death penalty on the African continent or at least impose a moratorium on its execution across the entire Continent.”

Read the rest of the Coalition's article, which also mentions the Journey of Hope's visit.

Working for abolition in Mongolia

A delegation of MVFHR members is in Mongolia this week, working with allies to support efforts to abolish the death penalty in that country. We'll post photos and reports from the various events as soon as they're available. One of today's activities is a press conference in connection with World Day Against the Death Penalty. Here is the group's public statement:

Today is World Day Against the Death Penalty, a day when nations around the globe stand in solidarity against the use of capital punishment. Members of Murder VIctims' Families for Human Rights, a United States-based international organization, are in Mongolia on this day to lend support to those who are calling for an end to the death penalty in this country. We are meeting with other family members of murder victims to share our common pain, and we are meeting with public officials and others to explain why we oppose the death penalty. As survivors with a direct stake in the death penalty debate, we join today in the call for a worldwide moratorium on executions. Let us not respond to violence with more violence. Let us recognize that justice for victims is not achieved by taking another life.

Read MVFHR's general statement on World Day Against the Death Penalty.

Read about MVFHR's previous work in Mongolia.

World Day Against the Death Penalty

Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights

Statement on World Day Against the Death Penalty

Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights is a U.S.-based international organization of family members of homicide victims and family members of people who have been executed. As survivors with a direct stake in the death penalty debate, and as people who believe in the value of basic human rights principles, we join today in the call for a worldwide moratorium on executions.

The most basic of human rights, the right to life, is violated both by homicide and by execution. We call today for a consistent human rights ethic in response to violence: let us not respond to one human rights violation with another human rights violation. Let us recognize that justice for victims is not achieved by taking another life.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was inspired by victims, demanded by victims. It grew out of the suffering of millions of civilians murdered under the brutal regimes of the Second World War, and its adoption on December 10, 1948 was a way to honor the loss of those lives by asserting that such violations are neither moral nor permissible under any nation or regime.

Now, over sixty years later, let us recognize that violations of human life in the form of the death penalty should not be permissible under any nation or regime. Working across state and national borders, united by our losses and our opposition to further killing, members of MVFHR call for abolition of the death penalty because the only way to uphold human rights is to uphold them in all cases, universally.

In Colorado

MVFHR's Renny Cushing will be the keynote speaker at the Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons conference this weekend, and will also meet with members of Coloradoans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Read MVFHR's newsletter article describing the work of Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons.

Read MVFHR's newsletter issue with a feature on how unsolved murders affect victims' families.

Read more about Renny Cushing's legislation regarding victims' compensation and cold cases.

25 quotes

MVFHR is mentioned in this column by Tom Hennessy in Saturday's Long Beach (CA) Press-Telegram:

When Troy Davis was executed in Georgia last month for the 1989 murder of police officer Mark MacPhail, opponents of capital punishment nevertheless took solace in hoping that the death penalty was on its way to being abolished.

After all, Davis had more going for him than almost any of the 1,270 U.S. prisoners put to death since 1976. About 650,000 Americans had signed petitions opposing his execution. Those pleading for his life included Pope Benedict XVI, former President Jimmy Carter and former FBI director William Sessions.

Seven of the original nine eyewitnesses had recanted their testimony. Thus, the possibility remained that Davis was innocent. But likely, we will never know. Once a suspect has been executed, the justice system does not encourage further investigation.

Some of those who favored the execution say they did so on the premise that the death of Davis will bring closure to the family of Officer MacPhail.

But Jeanne Woodford doubts that assessment. As former warden of San Quentin State Prison, she became so distressed by a lifetime of helping administer the death penalty that on May 12 she took on a radically different post: executive director of Death Penalty Focus, a San Francisco-based group opposed to capital punishment. She was one of six ex-wardens opposed to the killing of Davis.

"The death penalty serves no one." Woodford has said. "It doesn't serve the victims. It doesn't serve prevention. It's truly all about retribution."

She is not alone. In the following paragraphs, 25 other notable people, widely quoted on a variety of websites, express their views on capital punishment, a subject that may well be on the California ballot next year.

A justice's view

1. "... the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent."

Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr.

2. "I was eight years old when my father was murdered. It is almost impossible to describe the pain of losing a parent to a senseless murder ... But even as a child, one thing was clear to me: I didn't want the killer, in turn, to be killed. I remember lying in bed and praying, `Please, God. Please don't take his life, too.' I saw nothing that could be accomplished in the loss of one life being answered with the loss of another."

Kerry Kennedy, daughter of the late Sen. Bobby Kennedy.

3. "If not remedied, the scandalous state of our present system of capital punishment will cast a pall of shame over our society for years to come. We cannot let it continue."

Justice Thurgood Marshall, 1990.

4. "You believe an eye for an eye until you are put in that situation. If they kill those guys, it really doesn't mean much to me. My father is gone."

Basketball player Michael Jordan on the murderers of his father, James.

5. "Government ... can't be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill."

Sister Helen Prejean, author of "Dead Man Walking."

6. "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."

Mark Twain.

Primitive nation?

7. "It's just really tragic after all the horrors of the last 1,000 years we can't leave behind something as primitive as government-sponsored execution."

Sen. Russ Feingold.

8. "To top it off, for those of you who are interested in the economics, it costs more to pursue a capital case toward execution than it does to have full life imprisonment without parole."

Ralph Nader.

9. "Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order."

George Will.

10. "A humane and generous concern for every individual, his health and his fulfillment, will do more to soothe the savage heart than the fear of state-inflicted death, which chiefly serves to remind us how close we remain to the jungle."

U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

11. "When you execute a man who has been on death row seven, eight, 10 or 12 years, you are not executing the same man that came in."

Don Cabana, former warden of Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary.

12. "Here I want to say that one must be careful in searching his soul ... one may just find that God is there and that he does not support the barbaric idea that man should execute man."

Ron McAndrew, former warden of Florida State Prison.

13. "To me the death penalty is vengeance, and vengeance doesn't really help anyone in the healing process."

Bud Welch, board president, Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights. His daughter, Julie, was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

14. "No man has the right to take God's place and say another man should die. It destroyed my life."

Perry Cobb, who spent eight years on Illinois' death row for a crime he did not commit. He was exonerated in 1987.

District attorney's view

15. "California's death penalty is ... an incredibly costly penalty, and the money would be better spent keeping kids in school, keeping teachers and counselors in their schools and giving the juvenile justice system the resources it needs."

Former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti.

16. "Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders."

French philosopher Albert Camus.

17. "My overriding belief is that it is always possible for criminals to improve and that by its very finality the death penalty contradicts this."

The Dalai Lama.

18. "People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty."

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

19. "To say that the death of any other person would be just retribution is to insult the immeasurable worth of our loved ones who are victims."

Marietta Jaeger. Her daughter, Susie, age 7, was kidnapped and murdered in 1973.

20. "I do not think that God approved the death penalty for any crime, rape and murdered included. Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God."

Martin Luther King Jr.

21. "I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an Angel of Death."

Nobel laureate, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

22. "The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics."

Bryan Stevenson, death row lawyer.

23. "Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job."

George Orwell.

24. "I believe that no one should be executed, guilty or innocent. There are appropriate sanctions that protect society and punish wrongdoers without forcing us to stoop to the level of the least among us at his or her worst moment."

Actor and activist Mike Farrell.

25. "I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished."

Jack Kemp, Republican vice presidential candidate, 1996.

Statement from theologians

MVFHR is mentioned in a statement from Catholic theologians calling for an end to the death penalty. Here's the piece from Monday's National Catholic Reporter, "Over 150 theologians call for abolition of the death penalty":

More than 150 Catholic theologians have signed a statement calling on the United States to abolish capital punishment, and asking the church to work "unwaveringly" toward that goal.

The statement, issued this morning on the Catholic Moral Theology blog, comes five days after the controversial Sept. 21 execution in Georgia of Troy Davis. Amnesty International, along with a number of faith and justice groups, had said that “serious doubts” remained over Davis’ guilt in the 1989 murder of a police officer.

Signing their names along with the institution where they teach, overwhelmingly at Catholic colleges and universities, the theologians reference church teachings on capital punishment and say they “deplore and lament the killing of Troy Davis” and “decry the death sentences of the more than 3,200 inmates on death row.”

Tobias Winright, an associate professor in theology at St. Louis University who helped draft the statement, said in a phone interview that the number of theologians interested in adding their name to the list is growing by the minute. The high number, he said, indicates that the movement to abolish the death penalty is backed by professors across the country, of every age and political stripe.

“We’ve had signers from North to South, West to East,” said Winright. “We have first year teachers, and people who have taught for many, many years. That reflects that this is an important issue to a lot of Catholic theologians right now.”

The statement, which Winright said started as an exchange between professors on a listserv over the morality of the killing of Davis, notes that, since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1973, 138 people have been exonerated from death row.

The number of people exonerated, the theologians write, reflects the fact that “execution is … irrevocable and innocent people have likely been victims of it.”

That probability of innocent victims of the death penalty speaks to the case of Davis, who maintained he was not guilty. His case garnered international attention when many of the witnesses who had implicated him in the murder recanted their testimony, and nine others signed affidavits implicating another man, whom Davis said was the actual killer.

Disproportionate among those who have been cleared of crimes worthy of the death penalty, the theologians’ statement says, are people of color, who “are from 3 to 5 times more likely to be executed if their victim was white.”

Citing the U.S. bishops’ 2005 statement “A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death,” the theologians’ statement says that while church teaching does not outlaw capital punishment, it recognizes that there are now other ways to “protect citizens from threats to the common good.”

The application of the death penalty is “deeply flawed and can be irreversibly wrong, is prone to errors, and is biased by factors such as race, the quality of legal representation, and where the crime was committed,” the statement quotes the bishops’ 2005 document.

Another sign of the importance of the death penalty question to Catholic theologians, Winright said, is that today’s statement has drawn signatures of those who have in the past disagreed on issues of doctrine or liturgy.

“While we may have disagreements on some things, on this issue there seems to be consensus,” said Winright.

While Winright said the theologians hadn’t specifically reached out to bishops to sign today’s statement, he noted they had received one bishop’s signature, Bishop John Michael Botean of the Eparchy of St. George in Canton, Ohio, and would welcome others.

Beyond practical questions of innocence or guilt of those on death row, the theologians say in their statement that the example of Christ, who himself was put to death, points to a “theological stance” that the death penalty is always wrong.

Acknowledging that the “Gospel message of forgiveness and love of enemies presents a difficult challenge” to those who have experienced murder in their families, the theologians write: “The Gospel teaches us how to become fully human: love, not hatred and revenge, liberates us. We need to forgive and love both in fidelity to the Gospel and for our own well-being.”

As an example of such forgiveness, the statement points to the work of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, an international group of families who have experienced a murder, yet publicly oppose the death penalty.

Victim's son objects

This Reuters story, "Victim's son objects as Texas sets execution date in hate crime death," was published on September 21st:

As Texas prepares to execute one of his father's killers, Ross Byrd hopes the state shows the man the mercy his father, James Byrd Jr., never got when he was dragged behind a truck to his death.

"You can't fight murder with murder," Ross Byrd, 32, told Reuters late Tuesday, the night before Wednesday's scheduled execution of Lawrence Russell Brewer for one of the most notorious hate crimes in modern times.

"Life in prison would have been fine. I know he can't hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn't what we want."

Brewer is scheduled to die by lethal injection after 6 p.m. local time in Huntsville, Texas.

His pending execution comes 10 years after Governor Rick Perry signed into law the James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act, strengthening punishments for hate crimes.

An avowed white supremacist, Brewer, 44, was one of three white men convicted of capital murder in the kidnapping and killing of Byrd Jr., in June 1998.

John King, another white supremacist, is on death row awaiting an execution date. Shawn Berry is serving a life sentence.

Brewer would be the 11th man executed in Texas this year. In Georgia, the execution of Troy Davis, convicted of killing a police officer, is scheduled for the same night.

If both executions go forward, Brewer and Davis would be the 34th and 35th executions in the United States in 2011.

In Texas, a vigil in Huntsville began at midnight with civil rights activist Dick Gregory.

PROTESTS

Gregory has joined Ross Byrd and Martin Luther King III in the past to publicly protest Brewer's execution.

Ross Byrd, a recording artist studying for his MBA at nearby Stephen F. Austin University, said Tuesday that he wouldn't attend the execution but will "be there in spirit."

He says he doesn't want to "waste my time" watching anybody die, even a man who killed his dad.

"Life goes on," said Byrd, who has a son. "I've got responsibilities that I have every day. It's not on the front page of my mind. I'm looking for happy times."

In a crime that touched off a nationwide effort to tighten punishments for hate crimes, Brewer, King and Berry were convicted of offering Byrd Jr. a ride on his way home from a party, and then attacking him while they were standing outside the truck smoking on a country road near Jasper, Texas, according to a report by the Texas Attorney General's Office.

They beat him, and then chained his legs to the back of their pick-up and dragged him for several miles, the report said. By the time they stopped, his head and arm had been ripped off. They left his body on the country road.

Brewer maintained his innocence, saying Berry had killed Byrd Jr. by cutting his throat. But prosecutors said Brewer and King were prison buddies bent on starting a racist organization in Jasper and "intended the killing to be a signal that his (King's) racist organization was up and running."

The crime touched off a firestorm of support in Texas and the United States for laws that would enhance punishments for crimes motivated by race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry.

The jury sentenced the three men as the nation was still reeling from a second hate crime that same year -- the October 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, beaten and left to die on a fence in Wyoming because he was gay.

'WATERSHED MOMENT'

In 2001, Texas passed its hate crimes bill named after Byrd Jr., and its symbolic signing by Perry was a "watershed moment" in Texas and one of Perry's "finest moments in office," said Texas state Senator Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat, who helped move the bill through the Texas Senate in spite of staunch Republican opposition.

Eight years later, President Obama signed into law a similar federal bill named after Byrd Jr. and Shepard.

"James Byrd's murder certainly changed Texas and, in many ways, the nation," Ellis told Reuters.

"It was a wake-up call that evil and hate, while no longer considered mainstream views, are more prevalent and virulent than we pretend."

Ellis said the death sentence in Brewer's case "will close a chapter in this tragic story."

"I cannot say for certain that it is a requirement in order for justice to be served but, as Mr. Brewer was a ringleader in the most brutal hate crime in the post-Civil Rights era, it is certainly a very appropriate sentence," he said.

Unlike Byrd's children and wife, all of whom oppose the use of the death penalty against his killers, other family members have been supportive of it.

"I'm not down on them at all for the fact that they support the death penalty," said David Atwood, a good friend of Ross Byrd's and founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "They've gone through a traumatic experience, and there's a history in our country of horrible things happening to African Americans, so it's understandable that a number of them would say finally we're getting some justice."

He called Ross Byrd's stand "powerful."

Byrd says the execution of Brewer is simply another expression of the hate shown toward his father on that dark night in 1998. Everybody, he said, including the government, should choose not to continue that cycle.

"Everybody's in that position," he said. "And I hope they will stand back and look at it before they go down that road of hate. Like Gandhi said, an eye for an eye, and the whole world will go blind."

Progressing toward abolition

The MVFHR seminar in New Orleans over this past weekend was a powerful experience. The participants came from 21 states, and many were quite new to the abolition movement and to gathering with other victims' family members who oppose the death penalty. Participants had a chance to hear presentations about the history of the death penalty and of victims' voices within the abolition movement, victims' rights with respect to the death penalty, working with other victims' groups, ways that victims' voices can be amplified within the death penalty debate, and telling one's story publicly. In addition to the large-group presentations, there were opportunities for the family members of the executed, and family members of victims in unsolved murder cases, to meet and share experiences.

Today Renny Cushing is representing MVFHR in London at Penal Reform International's conference on “Progressing toward abolition of the death penalty and alternative sanctions that respect international human rights standards." Other speakers include a representative from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights and from human rights groups in Africa and Russia.

In New Orleans

We are in New Orleans this weekend, where MVFHR is holding a seminar and training about speaking out against the death penalty. This gathering brings together, from around the U.S., about 40 family members of murder victims and of people who have been executed, many of whom are new to anti-death penalty activism. We're looking forward to a powerful experience of learning and fellowship.

It will not help

From yesterday's Mississippi Clarion Ledger, "Victim's sister: no death penalty"

The beating and killing of James C. Anderson has drawn national outrage, but his sister said his killer or killers shouldn't be executed.

"Those responsible for James' death not only ended the life of a talented and wonderful man," Barbara Anderson Young wrote in her letter Wednesday to Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith. "They also have caused our family unspeakable pain and grief. But our loss will not be lessened by the state taking the life of another."

The June 26 slaying of Anderson in Jackson has sparked attention across the country as an alleged hate crime.

Smith said the letter resolves the question of the family's wishes, which he said would "weigh heavily" in deciding whether to pursue the death penalty against 19-year-old Deryl Dedmon Jr. of Brandon, who is charged with capital murder. Another defendant, John Aaron Rice, 18, of Brandon, is charged with simple assault.

A capital murder conviction carries the death penalty or life without parole. Those convicted of murder can petition for parole starting at age 65.

In her letter, Young quoted Coretta Scott King in explaining her opposition to capital punishment: "An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of human life."

Young wrote that the family's opposition to the death penalty is "deeply rooted in our religious faith, a faith that was central in James' life as well. Our Savior Jesus Christ rejected the old way of an eye for an eye and taught us instead to turn the other cheek. He died that we might have everlasting life and, in doing so, asked that the lives of the two common criminals nailed to the crosses beside him be spared. We can do no less."

She said the family also opposes any execution "because it historically has been used in Mississippi and the South primarily against people of color for killing whites. Executing James' killers will not help to balance the scales. But sparing them may help to spark a dialogue that one day will lead to the elimination of capital punishment."

The killing is being investigated by Jackson police, the U.S. Department of Justice and Smith's office.

Young thanked them Wednesday for their investigations.

"We hope that the criminal prosecutions will send a strong and clear message to those with hate in their hearts. We simply ask that that message be tempered with the love of our Savior," she wrote.

The family has started the James C. Anderson Foundation for Racial Tolerance "to help build bridges between the races," she said. "We appeal to men and women of goodwill to join hands with our family in launching a renewed movement of reconciliation, acceptance and hope."

Read the rest.