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Don’t execute Kevin Cooper!
OAKLAND, Calif.--With a February 10 execution date looming, the Committee to Save Kevin Cooper and other activist coalitions in California are in high gear to stop the execution of this innocent man. Because Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is an open supporter of capital punishment, it’s critical to build a loud and high-profile movement to put pressure on him. Will the "Governator" kill a Black man during Black History Month, while also gutting the budget for education and social services?
The most exciting development in the movement to save Kevin’s life is a signature ad to be published in a few large California daily and weekly newspapers, featuring the support of Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Howard Zinn, Jesse Jackson and actors Janeane Garofalo and Danny Glover. Through this ad and other upcoming events, we will show the Governator that the whole world is watching.
From the beginning, Cooper’s case has been tainted by racism, error and the possibility of police tampering with evidence used to convict him. And while Cooper has always maintained his innocence, another prison inmate actually confessed to the crime, providing his cellmate with information about the crime that was not reported in newspapers.
Fully 35 percent of California’s massive death row is Black, while only 6.7 percent of the population is Black. On February 3, activists across the state are holding a Day of Action to Save Kevin Cooper. Highlights include a press conference held with people of faith in the Los Angeles area, including the priest of the governor’s church, as well as protests and press conferences in Fresno, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Sacramento and Riverside.
It’s urgent that everyone get involved now to save this man’s life--and join the movement to abolish the death penalty once and for all, in California and across the U.S.
Call Gov. Schwarzenegger at 916-445-2841 or e-mail governor [at] governor.ca.gov. For more information about Kevin’s case and to get involved, go to http://www.savekevincooper.org.
http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-1/483/483_11_KevinCooper.shtml
From the beginning, Cooper’s case has been tainted by racism, error and the possibility of police tampering with evidence used to convict him. And while Cooper has always maintained his innocence, another prison inmate actually confessed to the crime, providing his cellmate with information about the crime that was not reported in newspapers.
Fully 35 percent of California’s massive death row is Black, while only 6.7 percent of the population is Black. On February 3, activists across the state are holding a Day of Action to Save Kevin Cooper. Highlights include a press conference held with people of faith in the Los Angeles area, including the priest of the governor’s church, as well as protests and press conferences in Fresno, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Sacramento and Riverside.
It’s urgent that everyone get involved now to save this man’s life--and join the movement to abolish the death penalty once and for all, in California and across the U.S.
Call Gov. Schwarzenegger at 916-445-2841 or e-mail governor [at] governor.ca.gov. For more information about Kevin’s case and to get involved, go to http://www.savekevincooper.org.
http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-1/483/483_11_KevinCooper.shtml
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When ‘due process’ stops progressing
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
By David Hudson
I was watching a television comedian last night whose routine began to mesh with something that’s been on my mind lately.
The experience wasn’t of the caliber of Newton’s epiphany under the apple tree, but I did sit up a little straighter on the sofa where I had been slumped in a post-dinner, pre-bedtime daze.
The comedian, a heavy-set Texan with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, was talking about the death penalty, making reference to the astonishing degree of comfort Texans seem to have with a down-home version of “death row” that might as well be called an assembly line.
Texas executed 24 in the last year but - if the drink-swilling, cigarette-smoking comic was any gauge of the average Texan - is dissatisfied with those numbers.
Texas, he said, is instituting a new law that allowed the penal system to speed the execution of “death row” prisoners whose acts were witnessed by at least three creditable eyewitnesses.
“The rest of you states are trying to end the death penalty. Well, Texas just put in an express lane,” he said as nearly as I can remember, separated as I was from my notepad.
He’s got a point, I thought.
If California (or any state) is going to have a death penalty, why don’t we use it? Use it or get rid of it.
California had 568 on death row in 2000. Having executed 14 in 2000, the last execution here occurred in 2002.
As it is, it seems to me the justice system regularly makes promises it may never keep.
After all, the vocabulary of the death penalty has the proper ominous ring, doesn’t it? A judge, having uttered the somber phase, “I sentence you to death by lethal injection,” (or in Nebraska, which can be a bit backward, via the electric chair), ought to be backed up by a system that promptly carries out that sentence.
It’s certainly true that using DNA tests many innocent people have been spared death - even after years and decades awaiting it. That’s great, but how many “death row” inmates face the three creditable eye-witnesses ( or the equivalent) mentioned by the comedian? More than a few, I’m sure.
One of them is scheduled to be executed Feb. 10 in California.
But Kevin Cooper, incarcerated for killing four people in 1983 in San Bernardino County, filed a clemency petition asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for leniency He had earlier appealed using the newest DNA tests, but those results only further implicated him.
I heartily hope we follow through with the promise we have made Mr. Cooper.
I’ve covered a fair number of trials in my short career as a reporter, and I’ve learned that the protective checks and balances provided by the system are capable of throwing the scale held by blindfolded Lady Justice out of whack.
Don’t get me wrong. I strongly believe in the justice system in general, but personally I have to admit I tend to think people are guilty until proven innocent.
So it seems to me that if a criminal is judged guilty and has that comparatively rare sentenced levied, following every reasonable test, the sentence ought to be carried out with dignity but with a fair amount of haste.
It comes down to doing what you said you were going to do.
http://www.ledger-dispatch.com/opinion/opinionview.asp?c=91559
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
By David Hudson
I was watching a television comedian last night whose routine began to mesh with something that’s been on my mind lately.
The experience wasn’t of the caliber of Newton’s epiphany under the apple tree, but I did sit up a little straighter on the sofa where I had been slumped in a post-dinner, pre-bedtime daze.
The comedian, a heavy-set Texan with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, was talking about the death penalty, making reference to the astonishing degree of comfort Texans seem to have with a down-home version of “death row” that might as well be called an assembly line.
Texas executed 24 in the last year but - if the drink-swilling, cigarette-smoking comic was any gauge of the average Texan - is dissatisfied with those numbers.
Texas, he said, is instituting a new law that allowed the penal system to speed the execution of “death row” prisoners whose acts were witnessed by at least three creditable eyewitnesses.
“The rest of you states are trying to end the death penalty. Well, Texas just put in an express lane,” he said as nearly as I can remember, separated as I was from my notepad.
He’s got a point, I thought.
If California (or any state) is going to have a death penalty, why don’t we use it? Use it or get rid of it.
California had 568 on death row in 2000. Having executed 14 in 2000, the last execution here occurred in 2002.
As it is, it seems to me the justice system regularly makes promises it may never keep.
After all, the vocabulary of the death penalty has the proper ominous ring, doesn’t it? A judge, having uttered the somber phase, “I sentence you to death by lethal injection,” (or in Nebraska, which can be a bit backward, via the electric chair), ought to be backed up by a system that promptly carries out that sentence.
It’s certainly true that using DNA tests many innocent people have been spared death - even after years and decades awaiting it. That’s great, but how many “death row” inmates face the three creditable eye-witnesses ( or the equivalent) mentioned by the comedian? More than a few, I’m sure.
One of them is scheduled to be executed Feb. 10 in California.
But Kevin Cooper, incarcerated for killing four people in 1983 in San Bernardino County, filed a clemency petition asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for leniency He had earlier appealed using the newest DNA tests, but those results only further implicated him.
I heartily hope we follow through with the promise we have made Mr. Cooper.
I’ve covered a fair number of trials in my short career as a reporter, and I’ve learned that the protective checks and balances provided by the system are capable of throwing the scale held by blindfolded Lady Justice out of whack.
Don’t get me wrong. I strongly believe in the justice system in general, but personally I have to admit I tend to think people are guilty until proven innocent.
So it seems to me that if a criminal is judged guilty and has that comparatively rare sentenced levied, following every reasonable test, the sentence ought to be carried out with dignity but with a fair amount of haste.
It comes down to doing what you said you were going to do.
http://www.ledger-dispatch.com/opinion/opinionview.asp?c=91559
Let's clear death row throught the nation. In one day we could EXECUTE EVERYONE of these CONVICTED MURDERERS.
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