Capital Punishment

Democracy Now! has this segment remembering Troy Davis, whose widely denounced and unjust execution coincided with the beginning of Occupy Wall Street.  Californians will be voting on whether or not to abolish capital punishment.

 

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Occupy Wall Street prepares for demonstrations marking the one year anniversary of the movement, and the right to peaceably assemble.  The following youtube was posted at the Occupy Wall Street website, and includes a few of the more tense stand-offs between demonstrators and police, including police violence, and over the First Amendment.




This blog started a year ago with the release of new Census Bureau information on soaring American poverty, and about one week before the Occupy Movement made its debut in Manhattan.  Little did the diarist know, at that time, we were about be chronicling, for better or worse, a major American uprising.   

Events also coincided with the execution of Troy Davis, another story the blogger happened to be following, and seemingly not "just coincidentally" connected to events unfolding on Wall Street-- with "justice" failing at all levels of the system-- its economic and social savagery revealed in a full panorama -- and public outcry spreading from New York and Georgia, to the midwest, the west coast, and over 1200 cities globally (and still spreading) by early October 2011.

What now?  Some feel that the uprising has been rapidly quashed, others, that it lives, or others, that it has been absorbed into various activist movements ranging from housing to food to student debt to electoral politics to the peace movement.  That, to me, sounding similar to thoughts on where activities during the sixties went.

Myself, I can't wax profound on the subject;  I think Occupy has taught us that we have more power than we think, that we are stronger together than separately, and that we have more common grievances than we are otherwise aware of-- or that the mainstream media would like us to know about, and, that we have so many brilliant people in our ordinary midst, like lights to lead us out of darkness-- we must believe in ourselves and each other.
  
If Occupy Wall Street taught us how quickly things can happen "overnight," how quickly a mass movement can "spread," how many incredible people are "out there" standing up for change and resistance -- can we  not see how quickly things could, indeed, similarly change in terms of ending homelessness, hunger, war, poverty, unemployment, and crippling debt?

As an imagination artist, I believe this is possible.  And I know we have many imagination artists on this tiny, tiny planet spinning in vast spaces of a universe that dwarfs even the great star we call our sun.  With so many of us imagining a better today, can we make it happen?

Like I said, I never started out intending to write a blog about the Occupation.  You can see for yourself that this blog started about one week earlier.  I simply felt a responsibility, when I saw what was happening, and what the mainstream media was doing, to keep chronicling this uprising as it took place, and with respect to the contributions of citizen journalists, alternative media, and those I can only describe as true patriots.   Those who wanted to tell the story, not suppress it and thereby stop change from happening.  Those who were there "on the street."

For the record, I would say that the diary is conscientiously continued through the National Gathering in Philadelphia.  I don't know how long the chronicle will continue from this point onward.  

This entry marks my (more or less) personal statement on the subject of the Occupation and the blog itself.  A one year bookmark, so to speak.  

Power to the People.  Peace.  

Courtesy of Occupy Eugene, Oregon

Photographer:  Brenna

Children Occupy protesters carrying signs reading, 
"Invest In Me" and "People (and Pandas) Before Profits."

steinbeck

 

from film portrayals of lennie small 

in john steinbeck's of mice and men -

adapted for film several times,

also for stage and radio.

pleas for justice fall again upon deaf ears as the state of texas executes a developmentally disabled man named marvin wilson who had an i.q. of 61.

robert mackey with the new york times reports that john steinbeck's family has expressed outrage that a texas judge used of mice and men to support the decision to take marvin wilson's life.  thomas steinbeck, the writer's son, released a statement reading, in part:

On behalf of the family of John Steinbeck, I am deeply troubled by today’s scheduled execution of Marvin Wilson, a Texas man with an I.Q. of 61. Prior to reading about Mr. Wilson’s case, I had no idea that the great state of Texas would use a fictional character that my father created to make a point about human loyalty and dedication, i.e., Lennie Small from “Of Mice and Men,” as a benchmark to identify whether defendants with intellectual disability should live or die.

My father was a highly gifted writer who won the Nobel Prize for his ability to create art about the depth of the human experience and condition. His work was certainly not meant to be scientific, and the character of Lennie was never intended to be used to diagnose a medical condition like intellectual disability. I find the whole premise to be insulting, outrageous, ridiculous and profoundly tragic. I am certain that if my father, John Steinbeck, were here, he would be deeply angry and ashamed to see his work used in this way. And the last thing you ever wanted to do, was to make John Steinbeck angry.

 

mr. mackey continues:

In 1937, the novelist himself told The New York Times that the model for his character, a killer who did not comprehend his own actions, was shown leniency by the American legal system of the time. “Lennie was a real person,” Mr. Steinbeck said. “He’s in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times I saw him do it. We couldn’t stop him until it was too late.”

the following youtube was released by democracy now! the night before mr. marvin was executed, and includes discussion with mr. wilson's attorney, lee korvarsky, and richard dieter, executive director of the death penalty information center, a nonprofit group working to educate the public about capital punishment.

mr. dieter says that texas is disturbingly experimenting with humans in new ways to execute death row prisoners, and that they are purchasing various drugs for execution indirectly from european companies that did not manufacture the drugs for this purpose.  

the european nations - which have outlawed capital punishment - are expressing outrage that these drugs are being used to execute people in the united states.

the texas tribune reports that prior to mr. wilson's execution, and amidst an outcry of objections, 

State Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, on Monday wrote to Gov. Rick Perry seeking a stay of execution on Wilson's behalf. Human Rights Watch also decried the planned execution.

“Texas is circumventing the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment,” said Antonio Ginatta, U.S. advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

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"