I Am Troy Davis

 

Courtesy of Street Art Londgon

Photographer:  Rikki

"Making the Invisible Troy Davis Visible" -

from an installation piece in support of Amnesty International's

efforts to stop the execution of Troy Davis

California prepares another ballot initiative, this one on the death penalty.  Which of course brings back sorrowful memories of the Troy Davis execution and the Kafkaesque manner in which he proceeded to a state-ordained "destiny" of lethal injection, in spite of all evidence and humanitarian and logic-based pleas to the contrary.  Sanity fell upon deaf ears.

The Monterey Herald reports:

For the third time in 40 years, Californians will vote in November on the death penalty, an institution that has had at least as much impact on the state's politics as on its institutions of crime and punishment. Opponents of capital punishment said Thursday they were submitting 800,000 signatures on petitions for an initiative to close the nation's largest Death Row, which has 725 condemned prisoners. The measure needs 504,760 valid signatures to make the ballot.

"California voters are ready to replace the death penalty with life in prison with no chance of parole," declared Jeanne Woodford, who oversaw four executions as warden of San Quentin State Prison. She now heads the anti-capital punishment group Death Penalty Focus.

It was an unusually optimistic statement in a state whose residents have consistently supported the death penalty. The most recent Field Poll, in September, showed 68 percent support — although respondents in the same survey, when asked their preferred sentence for murder, backed life without parole over death by 48 to 40 percent.

The last time the issue was on the ballot, Californians voted by a 71 percent majority in 1978 to expand a death penalty law that legislators had passed the year before over Gov. Jerry Brown's veto. When the state Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, voters overrode the decision by a 67.5 percent majority

 The court itself was shaken in 1986 when voters unseated Chief Justice Rose Bird and two colleagues who had regularly voted to overturn death sentences. Since then, the California court has had one of the nation's highest rates of upholding death judgments.

Like health care for all, are Californians ready to choose life?

Courtesy of Feministing

U.S. Demonstrators, "I Am Troy Davis"