Human Right for Prisoners

This article examines capital punishment in murder cases, one case in particular. While many people support the death penalty and have good reasons to support such a controversial issue, I will offer deeply personal and compelling evidence to demonstrate why I do not support capital punishment.

A Brutal Murder and the Aftereffects

On January 15, 1982, in his birthplace of Oklahoma City, OK, a 29-year-old man was gunned-down in the parking lot of a popular night club by his roommate, a person who he considered his close friend. The murder victim had a young son, siblings, and one surviving parent. A very talented man, he built and sold wood furniture and played the drums. He worked hard at everything he did, and he had many friends.

His murderer shot him twice, once in the chest, and once in the abdomen, but did not stop with just killing him. He drove the victim’s body 50 miles from the murder scene where he dumped it in a drainage ditch like a sack of garbage. A road crew found the body five days later. The man had been robbed and his clothing partially removed. On January 30, 1982, the Oklahoma City police department notified the victim’s family of his death.

The killer’s trial began in April 1982, and after deliberating for 22 minutes, a seven-woman, five-man jury found 27 year-old Dennis Ray Benton* guilty of first-degree manslaughter and later sentenced him to 70 years in prison.

Every three years when Benton’s parole hearing takes place, the victim’s sister petitions the Oklahoma parole board in an effort to keep him incarcerated. Although she did not want his life taken as he took her brother’s life, she feels that he should serve his total sentence. She reasons that he suffers more for his crime by living his life in prison, whereas he would suffer very briefly if executed. If Benton lives long enough to serve his sentence which got reduced to 46 years, a 73 year-old broken-down man will leave prison with no income, and a lot of worry about survival on the outside.

My older brother, Michael, should not have died in such a gruesome and tragic manner. However, while it seems logical that the state of Oklahoma should have taken Benton’s life, killing him would not have brought Michael back.

Although I still grieve heavily over my brother’s death, I do not believe that the execution of Benton would have provided my family and me with relief or closure. Yes, Benton took Michael from us, but the intentional taking of a human life by any method, including government mandate, still constitutes murder.

Judicial Death

Since 1976, judicial death has claimed the lives of 1,184 Americans with 20 of the executions carried out in 2011. As journalist William Bole questioned, in 1977 countries such as Western Europe and Cambodia stopped using capital punishment, so why does the United States still kill in order to demonstrate that killing is wrong? When other nations view a practice collectively, the United States takes a different position regardless of the consequences.

In America, 34 states practice the “an-eye-for-an-eye, a-tooth-for-a-tooth” method of retribution against people who commit savage and barbaric crimes such as murder. Other than the satisfaction that each stakeholder in an execution feels when the killer realizes that his or her own death has arrived, how can we justify committing the same crime that the offender committed to bring justice and closure to victims’ friends and families? How can the murder of a second person correct the murder of the first person when not one, but two or more lives have been taken?

Bedau’s Fantasy Argument

I’ll give an example of the death penalty offered by professor of philosophy, Gary Colwell, where in 2002, he presents philosopher Hugo Bedau’s fantasy-world argument to establish the morality of the death penalty. What if the execution of each murderer simultaneously restored the murder victim back to life as if no murder had ever happened?

If asked the question, “How much would you be willing to sacrifice for your beliefs?” the average individual would probably look bewildered. Would you be willing to give up your friends, family, freedom, even possibly your life for a cause that was dear to you? The cynic inside me says, “Probably not.” In this society, people have a tendency to speak with much grandiloquence about their beliefs but when asked to sacrifice for those same beliefs, they crumble. Assata Shakur did not. Assata Shakur is a revolutionary and one of the most wrongly convicted individuals in U.S. history. Her story is a sad chapter in American history, in which the color of her skin, social class, political affiliation, and gender played a role in her subsequent exile from her homeland.

On May 2, 1973, racial prejudice would change the life of Assata Shakur. An incident of what would now be labeled “racial profiling” takes place on the New Jersey Turnpike. Ms. Shakur, an active participant in the Black Liberation Army (BLA), was traveling with friends, Malik Zayad Shakur and Sundiata Acoli when state troopers stopped them, reportedly because of a broken headlight. A trooper explained that they were “suspicious” because they had Vermont license plates. The three were made to exit the car with their hands up. All of a sudden, shots were fired. When it was all over, state trooper Werner Foerster and Malik Shakur were killed.

Ms. Shakur and Mr. Acoli were charged with the deaths of state trooper Foerster and Zayd Malik Shakur. While held in jail, she was shackled and chained to a bed, with bullet wounds still in her chest. She was also forced to undergo the jabs of shotgun butts of the New Jersey State troopers and heard their voices shouting Nazi slogans and threats to her life. In the history of New Jersey had a female prisoner ever been treated as she, confined to a men’s prison and placed under a constant twenty-four hour surveillance of her most intimate bodily functions.
Ms. Shakur and Mr. Acoli were eventually sentenced to life plus thirty-three years. Although the verdict was no surprise since it was an all White jury who convicted them, many questioned the racial injustice of the trial because it was riddled with many human rights violations and constitutional errors. The pretrial publicity was extremely negative and African-Americans were purposely excluded from the jury. Even more incredible was the fact Ms. Shakur was shot with her arms in the air, making it anatomically impossible for her to commit the murders she was convicted of.

However, in the country of the United States where there is suppose to be freedom, justice, and liberty for all, the only people who have that luxury are the rich, particularly, White males. Ms. Shakur had the triple jeopardy of being Black, female, and poor and she was a member of a political organization that had been targeted by the CIA and the FBI because of its political views. Any organization that challenges the status quo has to be eliminated at all costs.

Assata Shakur spent six and a half years in prison, two of those in solitary confinement. During that time, she was beaten and tortured on a daily basis. Although there is no mention of rape, she was probably sexually harassed everyday of her imprisonment. While imprisoned, she gave birth to her daughter Kakuya, whom they took away a week after birth. In 1979, fearing for her life, she made a daring escape that continues to infuriate the United States government. There was a nationwide search for her but not a trace of her or the people who aided her escape was ever found. In 1984, she was granted political asylum by Fidel Castro, dictator of Cuba and was finally united with her daughter. On May 2, 2005, the federal government issued a statement in which they labeled Ms. Shakur a domestic terrorist. In addition to doing that, the government also increased the bounty on her head from $150,000 to an unprecedented $1,000,000.

When I first read about Ms. Shakur, I cried. I could not believe the things that
this woman went through for fighting for basic human rights. Because of the triple
jeopardy of race, sex, and class and her political affiliation, she was unjustly sentenced to jail for a murder she did not commit. According to research, African-American women experience more bias in the courts than White women on the basis that White women are presumed to be good mothers by virtue of marital status (Andersen, p.285) and Black women are not. Black women have been historically stereotyped as sexually deviant troublemakers who need to be controlled.