By: Kenneth ‘Haramia’ Foster
The more that I view the capital punishment process, the less I become surprised at its contradictive ways. When something is built on pollution there’s no way it can be pure – thus the death penalty process. At every interval the death penalty proves itself vile and contradictive – be it out the mouths of the hateful politicians that propagate it or written on the law books from state to state. Law is supposed to be consistent, firm and impartial, but that’s something the amerikan judicial system has never known as they make up the rules as they go to cover their faults and fallacies. The amerikan judicial system is like a 4-legged table with 3 legs the same size and a 4th a tad bit shorter. To make it ‘stable’ they take a piece from one of the longer legs to add to the shorter; thinking they’ve fixed the problem they come to find out that the same problem exist. So, they’ll take a piece from another part of the table to add to that short leg. This only leads to another problem when all that needed to be done in the first place was address and correct the shorter leg directly.
The system proclaims that that the death penalty is reserved for the worse of the worse crimes – the most heinous. That’s a repulsive lie. Don’t get me wrong though – when a person, regardless of their crime, is able to escape the death penalty, I’m glad. You see, my focus moves above and beyond the person and what they did, but towards a trained system that has been pumping out a process of genocide for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Plain and simple, murder doesn’t stop murder nor does it bring social order or peace.
What brought this to mind was the case of Eric Rudolph, the man responsible for the bombings at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Earlier this year, around April 2005, Rudolph was given the chance to plea out to 4 consecutive life sentences (not just for the Olympic bombing, which killed only one woman, but for 3 other murders). It was believed that Rudolph was a follower of a white supremacist religion that’s anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-Semitic. One of the bombings that Rudolph pleaded out to was at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, where on off-duty police officer was killed.
Rudolph was captured May 2003. Over those 7 years Rudolph was on the run in the mountains of Western North Carolina, and was captured after scavenging for food near a grocery store in Murphy, NC. To begin to show the bias and contradiction in this system, let’s look at Rudolph’s case from a few perspectives. Post 9-11, men of Rudolph’s description would be considered a terrorist without hesitation. Right now, Muslims in this country are facing attack from the government and being suspected as terrorists for simply having an Arabic name. You also have Muslims being charged with conspiracy of terrorist plots, which they are facing the death penalty for. However, in this April 9, 2005 article on Rudolph out of the San Antonio Express, they come nowhere near raising this form of concern about Rudolph or this supposed white supremacist religion he was a follower of. As many men on death row can testify to, if they had just been a part of a local gang expert in the court room citing how these gangs deal with extortion, drugs, murder and whatever else, they would think of. It doesn’t seem like the scales of justices were very balanced here. While ones may not care to hear the truth of the matter, white supremacist groups have ran rampant in this country for years upon years. The KKK, the most well known terrorist group to come out of the USA, has been allowed to survive and thrive with little to no resistance. If there were groups in the U.S. doing things similar to the KKK, or this group Rudolph was supposed to be a follower of, but acting in the names of socialism, Islam, anarchism, etc., they’d be called terrorist cells groups and madmen. I think that speaks for itself.
Right now, on Texas’ death row, you have men facing execution for as little as being present at the scene of a crime. They’ve killed none. You have men here on death row who were mentally ill or retarded, or those that acted out in a crime of passion. That made no difference. However, this man of obvious intelligence- and I quote journalist Jay Reeves: “the former soldier used survival techniques to live off the land for more than 5 years all while being on the FBI’s ‘10 Most Wanted fugitives’ – gets a death pass. Less deserving men have not been as fortunate.
The conclusion to all of this is – if Eric Rudolph can qualify for a death pass, then every other man of equal, and ESPECIALLY lesser guilt, should receive the same. If a man like Eric Rudolph can commit crimes like this and not receive the death penalty, then we should just do away with the death penalty as a whole. Obviously, they saw something in the case of Rudolph that caused them to not seek the death penalty so let the same evaluation process spill over to everyone else. You have to really think about a case like this and its results to understand how/why the death penalty is a tool used for systematic genocide. You can’t have a fair system when it has a standard of law and it picks and chooses who to use it on. What this means is it’s time to eradicate the death penalty in amerika and build true systems that’s about reform and rehabilitation, which will cease the systematic genocide and give us some true social order and peace.
