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Message from Mumia Abu-Jamal Bonjour mes amis du mouvement d'abolition de peine de mort en Republique francaise. I thank ya'll and particularly our hard working sister, Julia Wright, who has been a light and strong arm of freedom movements for several generations. Merci ma soeur! Friends, supporters, comrades: your vigourous and various struggles against the death penalty are a light unto the world, and a welcome voice for many of us who dwell in what has become the prisonhouse of nations. America's voracious appetite for death is growing. The recent selection of George W. Bush to the American presidency bodes ill for men, women, and juveniles on death rows all across the nation--state and federal. Bush, the younger, was elevated to the office by the Supreme Court in an unprecedented act, and following a hotly-disputed election. His term as Governor of Texas is among the bloodiest in history. While Governor of the Lone Star State, the death chambers were drenched in blood. Texas led the other American states in legal lynchings, and that gruesome fact became an important qualification for higher political office. Governor Bush became President Death. To the United States (called a "hyperpower" by some French critics), international law is just a tool to be used against nations it doesn't like, and something to be ignored when it comes to the U.S. itself. Several international treaties forbid the execution of people who were 18 years or under at the time of their offense. The legalized lynching of Shaka Sankofa (born Gary Graham), who was 18 at the time of his arrest, proves that, to the American empire, international law is a dead letter. And to such a "hyperpower," international law can be violated and passed over with impunity. They are so powerful, so feared, that their very violation of the law is seen as legal. Recently, the American press has reported a series of cases where juveniles, some as young as 12 or 13 years old, have been tried as adults. Those children have been sentenced to adult prisons, literally, for the rest of their lives. Others, who were 16, 17, or 18 years of age are waiting for death at the hands of the state, as we speak. How can the world's leader in prison population parade as the paragon of human rights? How can women be the fastest growing segment of the prison industry, and the nation that cages them be the arbiter of international law? To an Empire, its will is law alone. No other law exists. Many nation-states have beginnings in struggles against foreign elites, against repressive feudal elites, and as a by-product of economic activity. America has her roots in slavery. When the Consitution was written, representatives from the Northern and Southern states formed what they called "the Great Compromise," a not-so-great agreement that rewarded the South with more and more representation and power in Congress, as the region acquired more and more African slaves. Now, a civil war and centuries later, the shadow of those deeply anti-democratic beginnings falls over American domestic policy. For is it but coincidence that prisons are preserved for the poor (especially Black urbanites), or that Death Row is a predominantly African-American reservation? During the Nixon administration years (circa 1969 to 1974), the nation embarked on a so-called "law and order" binge that continues to this day. It is the modern-day trigger to the prison industrial complex, and one of Nixon's top aides, Chief-of-Staff H. R. Holdman, revealed what was the thinking behind the jargon when he wrote in his diary about discussions with his boss: "[President Nixon]emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to." Every major government, so-called anti-crime initiative, from the evisceration of ancient habeas corpus rights by the Clinton administration, to the stark militarization of American police as best shown in the brutal, vicious police bombing of the MOVE commune in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985, flows from that tortured, racist logic that Nixon whispered to his top aide. They have created a system that is racist to its core, "while not appearing to." When people are charged with capital crimes, they face a jury that has been purged of virtually all black representation, by design. In what is now known as "The McMahon Tapes," a chief homicide prosecutor in Philadelphia's District Attorney's office, while training junior prosecutors in how to select a jury, made the following remarks captured on video: "The case law says that the object of getting a jury is to get . . . I wrote it down. I looked at the cases. I had to look this up because I didn't know this was the purpose of a jury. 'Voir dire is to get a competent, fair, and impartial jury.' Well, that's ridiculous. You're not trying to get that." The prosecutor (named McMahon) left no room in the minds of those whom he was training what the objectives of jury selection really were: "[. . . ] The only way you're going to do your best is to get jurors that are as unfair and more likely to convict than anybody else in that room." That's how the District Attorney's office in Philadelphia picks juries, according to their own words. Is there any question that such a system is one that echoes Nixon's old adage to achieve racist ends, "while not appearing to." Indeed the District Attorney, on the same tape, refers to Black Philadelphians and their neighborhoods as "garbage," and taught his juniors how to remove Blacks from the jury for racist reasons, "while not appearing to." Is there any wonder that Philadelphia has one of the largest, Blackest death rows in America, exceeding some Southern states? There can therefore not be a World Congress that seeks to abolish the death penalty without an acute examination of the Philadelphia experience--for here is the epicenter. There can therefore not be a World Congress to abolish the death penalty without an acknowledgement that the racist instrument of white supremacy devalues Black life, whether that of an accused or a potential juror, while elevating white life. There can be no real movement here unless there is the recognition that law, whether international or domestic, is an illusion that is designed to perpetuate a polite status quo that for decades has been based upon the premise "that the whole problem is really the Blacks," and that the system must recognize this "while not appearing to." It is this very status quo that is the lifeblood of the vampirish American death machine. And it must be shattered if abolition can ever become reality. Thanks! Ona Move! Long Live John Africa! Mumia Abu-Jamal From Death Row SCI Greene June 2001 |