by Colin Donoghue
Daily Lobo columnist
I often hear of the progress our nation has made in eliminating racism, but this self-praise should be restrained.
Of course progress has been made, yet the severe racism that still exists is often ignored. Those who believe in a renewed America in which racism is more a historical calamity than a reality often cite the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. However, a close examination of the movement reveals the intense opposition it received, much of which came from our government.
Today, significant racism still exists - it was more than incompetence that led to the deadly delay in the response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. If a poll was taken of Katrina victims asking whether racists exist within the Bush administration, what do you think the results would be? Or if minorities in this country were asked if they have ever been victims of racial profiling? Or if the hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who were disenfranchised from the last two presidential elections were asked if racism still exists in our government, what do you think their answers would be?
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Polls like this have been done recently by USA Today and the Washington Post, both resulting in the majority response of "Yes."
Another crucial and current example of racism in American policy is with the use of the death penalty. In 1972, the Supreme Court banned the death penalty in the United States, finding executions to be haphazard and racially discriminatory. Capital punishment returned in the late 1970s when state laws claimed to have removed all faults with executions.
Many believe these faults continue to exist. Amnesty International USA, for example, states: "Imposition of the death penalty is so riddled with class and race bias that it is used almost exclusively on the poor and people of color."
Sen. Russ Feingold said: "We simply cannot say we live in a country that offers equal justice to all Americans when racial disparities plague the system by which our society imposes the ultimate punishment."
Illinois is the only state that legalized the death penalty but has an execution moratorium in place, which was signed six years ago by then-Gov. George Ryan. Ryan said at the time about the death penalty: "The system has proved itself to be wildly inaccurate, unjust, unable to separate the innocent men from the guilty and, at times, a very racist system."
In New Jersey, the odds of an African-American person receiving a death sentence are more than 10 times the odds for a non-African-American defendant whose case has equivalent characteristics. Additionally, the U.S. General Accounting Office, and independent Congressional body, found a pattern of "evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty." The study concluded that a defendant was several times more likely to be sentenced to death if the murder victim was white, supporting the belief of many capital punishment abolitionists that a higher value is placed on the lives of whites in the American criminal justice system.
Today, the United States is far behind the global trend of abolishing the death penalty. The growing list of countries in the world that have put an end to the death penalty for all crimes include: Australia, Canada, Cambodia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Haiti, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Venezuela.
By retaining the death penalty, the United States remains in the company of three of the world's worst human rights abusers: China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Even more disturbing was the behavior of the United States in April 1999, when the U.N. Human Rights Commission passed a resolution supporting a worldwide moratorium on executions.
This resolution called on countries that had not yet abolished the death penalty to severely restrict their use of the death penalty. This included not imposing the death penalty on juvenile offenders and limiting the number of offenses for which it can be imposed. Guess who was included in the 10 countries that voted against the resolution? China, Pakistan, Rwanda, Sudan, and, of course, the United States.
Why are we aligning ourselves with some of the most oppressive and undemocratic governments in the world? Why do we continue to execute our citizens when it has been proven that capital punishment does not act as an effective deterrent from future crimes, and has almost certainly resulted in the deaths of innocents?
Of course, I don't expect the Bush administration to make our nation's policies more moral and in synch with world consensus - its modus operandi is quite the opposite. After all, Texas led the nation in executions while Bush was its governor.
With an immoral federal government, what can we as a people do to end the injustice, racism and immorality of capital punishment? We must demand that our representatives redeem our nation from this shameful and racist practice by abolishing the death penalty, state by state, so that America can regain some moral credibility in the world.
