Building a Unified Strategy to End the Death Penalty

Building a Unified Strategy to End the Death Penalty
> COMMITTING to CONSCIENCE
> November 16th - 19th, 2000
> Cathedral Hill Hotel
> 1101 Van Ness Avenue
> San Francisco
> _____________________________________
> Co-sponsored by: American Friends Service Committee, Death Penalty Focus,
> and the National Coalitoin to Abolish the Death Penalty. Participating
> organizations include: American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty
> International, Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, Religious
> Organizing Against the Death Penalty Project, and Labor for Mumia.
> _____________________________________
>
> The labor movement was organized to enable working people to redress the
> injustices that plague our lives. The death penalty is used almost
> exclusively against the working class, not merely as a misguided and
> misdirected response to crime, but primarily as a means of social control
> and class suppression. Ours is one of a small number of nations in the
> world that still employ this barbarous, racist, and class-biased form of
> state murder.
>
> It's time for working people to challenge a system that executes the poor,
> targets effective fighters for social justice, and victimizes people of
> color...all in the name of 'justice.'
>
> This historic conference will bring together social justice fighters from
> many walks of life and all parts of the country to put abolishing the death
> penalty at the top of the movement's agenda and to bring awareness of its
> injustice to the nation's attention.
>
> Three workshops on Saturday, November 18th will be of particular interest
> to labor movement activists. Each will examine a different aspect of
> labor's connection to the fight to abolish the death penalty. The morning
> workshop (from 10:15 to 10:45 a.m.) will look at labor's past experience
> through a discussion of such cases as those of the Haymarket martyrs, Sacco
> & Vanzetti, Joe Hill, and others. The second workshop (from 1:15 to 2:45
> p.m.), will examine the current situation through cases like that of Mumia
> Abu-Jamal and the labor movement's involvement on his behalf. A third
> workshop (from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m.) will look to the future and discuss how
> unions and other workers' organizations can become a vital part of the
> movement to abolish the death penalty.
>
> As Walter Johnson, Secretary-Treasurer of the San Francisco Labor Council
> has observed, "The labor movement has to show that it's not going to sit in
> the bleachers while someone is being sent to the gallows."
>
> You are invited and urged to attend this important conference and to spread
> word about it throughout your union and other organizations. Please pass
> this invitation on to others who may be interested. Let's start the new
> millenium by bringing the U.S. into the civilized community of nations that
> have already abolished this form of judicial terror.
>
> For more information: Contact Labor for Mumia at 510-665-5810 or
> <Labor4Mumia [at] aspenlinx.com