The Weeds that Bind

By:
Reginald “Omari Huduma” Blanton

Remember that “strange fruit”--African Americans hanging from that “good ol’ oak”
in the middle of the town’s square, burned and dismembered before throngs of white, and
sometimes smiling, spectators? This wasn’t only the Death Penalty’s popular form
throughout chattel slavery and up until the early 1900’s but is the grave in which the
Death Penalty’s roots are deeply embedded. Eventually, the people began to decry this
barbaric “justice” and to appease society’s conscience; the Death Penalty took on a lynch
mob-turned-superficial-trial-type setting. Then, execution by electrocution spread like
weeds across American civilization.
In 1972, slavery’s ghost haunted the Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia(92 SCT
2726; 408 US 344), a case challenging the constitutionality of the Death Penalty’s arbitrary
infliction against African Americans who committed murder or rape, but not European
Americans who committed the same crimes. As opposed to uprooting these deadly weeds
by abolishing the Death Penalty, the laws governing its application were merely mowed
down (because of its over-broadness allowing arbitrary application). Four years later
(1976), these weeds were back in the yard, along with new Death Penalty statutes
systematically narrowing death penalty eligible crimes and the juries sentencing
discretion. A mere “legislative-gauze”. For these “new” statutes didn’t do away with the
mentalities that led to the Death Penalty’s arbitrary infliction.
Each jolt and scream of the condemned in the electric chair jolted the conscience of
American people. One too many times the condemned burst into flames, and civilization
attempted another step away from its primitive and barbaric past, only to stumble over
those weeds, falling on yet another “humane” substitute for executions: the condemned,
strapped to a gurney resembling a horizontal cross, I.V, in his veins, looks to his left and
sees the stone faces of the victim’s family behind a viewing glass, then to his right, the
distraught and crying faces of his family behind a separate viewing glass. In a few
moments, a lethal concoction of chemicals (banned from use on animals by the American
Veterinary Medical Association) will poison the life-streams flowing through his veins
until he’s murdered.
A relic of crucifixion? After all, the second chemical (procronium bromide) in lethal
injection’s 3-chemical concoction is a powerful tranquillizer that paralyzes the diaphragm,
causing asphyxiation, and paralyzes the body, hiding the condemned’s suffering from the
onlooker. The latest and more sophisticated form the Death Penalty has taken.
Death Penalty advocates would have you think Americans still uphold the blind
principle of an “eye for an eye.” Though in recent surveys, the majority of Americans say
they would vote for life without parole over the Death Penalty. The Supreme Court said
the 18th amendment—against cruel and unusual punishment—“must draw its meaning
from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society. “So
why didn’t the American Government abolish the Death Penalty in accordance to society’s
evolved standard of decency revealed in those surveys? Specifically, why did Texas,
Governor Rick Perry merely make life without parole a “sentencing option” in Texas,
instead of abolishing the Death Penalty? What advantages does the Death Penalty offer
society to justify its existence? Here’s my case against the Death Penalty.
Nothings Changed

Since its not enough that innocent people have been executed and await execution,
from a legal standpoint, shouldn’t the fact that the majority of Death Row prisoners have
been found guilty under the following conditions:
 A jury devoid of their peers (which opens the door to subtle prejudices)
 Mistaken or perjured testimony (e.g. jailhouse snitching)
 Faulty police work (e.g. Houston Crime Lab)
 Coerced confessions
 Inept defense counsel
 Circumstantial evidence
Illegitamize their convictions? Even if Death Row Prisoners were justly convicted, the
majority don’t fall into the “worst of the worst” category, which—supposedly—justifies
their death sentence.
According to Death Penalty law, the Death Penalty may be sought against someone
who, for example shoots and kills someone while stealing their wallet (there has to be a
murder and another felony, e.g. burglary or robbery): whereas, someone who murders
someone every day of the week with a chainsaw may receive multiple life sentences at the
most. Because the former crime is considered more gruesome than the latter, the convicted
is labelled the “worst of the worst”—too violent to even be imprisoned around the
chainsaw murderer, and therefore, deserving of death.
One of the Death Penalty advocates biggest arguments for its use is that it deters
violent crimes. Yet, how can they argue deterrence when the Death Penalty is not used to
deter allviolent murders (though all murders are violent)? Remember the chainsaw
murderer? Here we are 34 years since Furman,and one of the reasons the Supreme Court
cited in the ruling the Death Penalty unconstitutional as it was applied then, still exist
now--- it’s being inflicted arbitrarily. They even observed that the Death Penalty seems to
stimulate criminal activity, as the higher crime rates in death penalty states than in non-
death penalty states continues to show.
Furthermore. In Furman, Thurgood Marshall (first African American Supreme Court
Justice) said “if the death penalty is used to encourage guilty pleas and thus to deter
suspects from exercising their rights under the sixth amendment to jury trials,”a state”
could not profess to rely on capitol punishment as a deterrent. “I remember how
prosecutors tried to coerce me and several other prisoners (some successfully) to plead
guilty for a life sentence by threatening us with the Death Penalty. And if prisoners
refused to buckle under that threat (as I did), forcing the state to spend hundreds of
thousands of tax payers’ dollars in a capitol murder trial, after prosecutors utilize jailhouse
snitch testimony, manipulates the jury by igniting subtle prejudices they may harbor, and
the defendant’s inept legal representation, to say the least, he may wish he had taken that
life sentence!
Before Death Penalty advocates can hope to argue deterrence, those they wish to deter
from committing capitol murder must be aware of its imminent threat. The Majority of
Texas death row prisoners I’ve spoken to confessed the Death Penalty never crossed their
minds when they were in the free world. Studies show now, just as Thurgood Marshall
stated in Furman, “it is extremely unlikely that much thought is given to penalties before
the act is committed, and even if it were…a murderer rarely expects to be caught and
usually assumes that if they are caught they will either be acquitted or sentenced to
prison.”
 If death penalty advocates wish to argue deterrence, they can at least come up with a
commercial concept akin to crashed cars as a result of drunken driver, or deteriorating
brains as a result of drugs. Maybe they can utilize “Death Vans” like China does; driving
city-to-city executing Death Row prisoners in the communities they committed their crime
in.
One of the most interesting things I’ve found is as opposed to imprisoning Texas’
death row prisoners the same way they are now, but in general population under a life
sentence, at half the tax payers’ dollars (saving approx. $1 million per prisoner; multiply
that by the 430 death row prisoners currently in Texas), the state would rather spend $2
million includes appeal costs, which would make sense. Here’s why: Texas allocates
$25,000 to court appointed attorneys for indigent death row prisoners (which over 90%
are) post conviction appeals. Though Texas lawyers protest that $25,000 is not enough (e.g.
California’s death row appellant attorneys spend $25,000 just on investigation, and can bill
the court up to $142,375), Gary Susswein, American-Statesman staff member, revealed in
his 5-26-02 article that more than $5 million of the “not enough” funds allocated for Texas
death row appeals, not only went unspent for the past 5 years at the time of the report, but
was funnelled back into the general state budget to fill state deficits. Perhaps this one of
the reasons Texas Governor Rick Perry chose to make life without parole a mere
sentencing option, preserving the Death Penalty, and the funds it brings the state.

Moral Deterioration

“The deleterious affects of the death penalty are also felt otherwise than at trial. For
example, its very existence ‘inevitably sabotages a social or institutional program of
reformation.’ In short, ‘the presence of the death penalty as the keystone of our penal
system bedevils the administration of criminal justice all the way down the line and is a
stumbling block in the path of general reform and treatment of crime and criminals.”
--Thurgood Marshall
Furman (408 U.S. 344,2792)

In Benedict Carey’s, “When Death is on the Docket, the Moral Compass Wavers”
(New York Times, 2-7-06) he reported groundbreaking research conducted by Stanford
psychologists on prison staff members who work on execution teams. These psychologists
found “that prison staff members who work on execution teams exhibit high levels of
moral disengagement (a process people utilize to buffer themselves from their own
consciences to engage in or permit acts that go against their morale) and the closer they
“came to killing the prisoner, the higher their level of disengagement was.” These
“members of the execution team were far more likely than guards not on the team to agree
that the inmates had lost important human qualities.” Otherwise, their conscience
wouldn’t allow their involvement in the execution of these inmates.
Some of the “justification” they cited to morally disengage themselves were religious
support such as an “eye for an eye” (quoting the Old Testament),speculation that the
prisoner cold escape and kill again-though escapes by Death Row prisoners are rare, and
the ones that have occurred in Texas have never resulted in another killing. This reasoning
forgets that murderers like the chainsaw murderer, who can’t receive the Death Penalty,
are imprisoned in a less secure environment than Death Row prisoners-and consideration
of the cost to society for caring for such prisoners (though it’s cheaper to care for the
prisoner than to kill him).
 Also highlighted was how the level of disengagement was about as high in a prison
worker that participated in an execution for the first time as it was for those who had been
a party to more than 15. Further, members of the execution support staff, specifically
counsellors working with the prisoners and victim’s families, though initially “highly
morally engages,” were found to share the same level of moral disengagement as those
involved, after being only a party to 10 executions. In other words, while those on the
execution teams had to morally disengage themselves as much for each execution, the
more those mere parties to the execution aided it indirectly, the more their morals
deteriorated until they shared the same mentality as the executioners. Thus why
psychologists said, “shifts in moral judgment are often unconscious, and can poison the
best instincts and intentions. “Sounds like what Thurgood Marshall said in the above
quote. Yet, the weeds “bedevilment” doesn’t stop spreading here.
The Psychologically torturing, sensory-depriving 23/24-hour solitary confinement of
Texas’ death row has and continues to push prisoners to various levels of despair. Some
prisoners lie in their own waste mutilate themselves, and have committed suicide by a
sheet or via the state (dropping their appeals to expedite execution). Sick and tired of this
dehumanizing anddeteriorating environment, several dedicated prisoners and I found the
movement called D.R.I.V.E: Death Row Inner-communalist Vanguard Engagement.
DRIVE implacably stands against the Death Penalty, while demanding as close to humane
treatment (because confinement under a sentence of death can NEVER be humane) as
possible as long as we have to be confined. We strive to create a sense of dignity and
brotherhood within these walls through standing in solidarity with our fellow prisoners-
turned-brothers, while relaying avenues the death row community can and should utilize
to attack these oppressive forces that creates our environment, as opposed to permitting
our own emasculation, and ultimately our destruction… which amounts to the destruction
of humanity (see www.drivemovement.org ).
On one occasion, Warden Hirch of Polunsky’s Unit Death Row, walked through Level
111 (where prisoners are subjected to the highest level of sensory deprivation) where they
had the DRIVE activists encaged. When DRIVE activist Kenneth Foster confronted
Warden Hirch about the deteriorating conditions, Warden Hirch responded, “Well, you
shouldn’t have come to Death Row. It’s a lot of taxpayers that could give a shit less what
you have, and think you have too much!” Doesn’t this sound like one of the several
justifications guards on the execution teams used to justify the condemned so-called
deserving of death? Warden Hirch’s “justification” allowed him to morally disengage
himself, even if subconsciously, to permit the deteriorating conditions to persist, which
only leads toward the deterioration of the minds and spirits of the death row prisoners he
oversees. For these reasons the Death penalty is so inherently unjust, anything associated
with it is equally inherently unjust; because it must function through the same corrupted
flow: from the law legalizing the denial of human right to life, to the minds of those who
morally disengage themselves to assist (whether directly or indirectly) in the taking of
these lives.

What enriches civilization, fear or love? Dr Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Civilization
and violence are antithetical concepts….,Through violence you may murder a murderer,
but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t
establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate.
Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that “But what is “light”.
 I once read about how a tribe in a northern region of South Africa responds to tribe
members that commit criminal offences. The tribe members are not ostracized, labelled”
the worst of the worst,” and then executed. Instead, the tribe forms a circle around their
member and for days reminds him how special and beautiful he is. Can you imagine how
uplifting and reconciling this could be? We should allow this light to guide us. I am not
saying we should follow this practice literally. But let’s analyze how we conduct business
inside our homes. Think of the person you love most; perhaps your mother. Now envision
finding out she committed capitol murder and the state is seeking the Death Penalty
against her. Would you want her to die?
Consider the victim’s mother’s pain. A pain she would want no mother to feel; yet the
condemned’s mother feels that same pain until the point of her child’s execution, and even
beyond. None of this pain is minimizing crime rates. However all the time, there’s
compassion in these respective homes-family members sharing love to heal the pain,
valuing each other’s lives the same.
We demonstrate our higher selves in the home, but feed our baser-selves by not seeing
our daughters, sons, brothers, and fathers outside the home. Civilization doesn’t exist
when it only exists inside the home. Only when we begin to see ourselves in others will we
attain that which we have been unsuccessfully seeking through perpetuating the very
atrocities we strive to prevent. It’s time we try an alternative. Let’s uproot these weeds,
throwing them to our primitive past, and allow civilization to flourish. Tell your state
representative “life over death” because the death penalty is KILLING US ALL …
morally, spiritually, and physically.

REGINALD BLANTON
DEATH ROW PRISONER 2008

©2008 by S. Stafford & Reginald Blanton. All text, pictures and graphics are copyrighted. Text, Picture, and graphics,
unless otherwise agreed upon, cannot be copied, transferred, produced or saved without prior written permission of
the publisher.

www.myspace.com/freereggieb

www.freereginaldblanton.com