ANTI DEATH PENALTY CONFERENCE

by Lenora B. Fulani

New Orleans, Louisiana 4 august 1995

Good afternoon. I'm very pleased to be here representing the Transnational Radical Party. All of us in this room today are, of course, long time opponents of the death penalty. We are among the first to say that it is immoral, inhuman and ineffective. Yet, while significant portions of the rest of the world are turning away from capital punishment, the United States is turning towards it. thus if we are to truly hold to our moral and humanistic convictions, then I think important to take a hard look at what has happened in this country with respect to the death penalty.

The death penalty is not, as we all know, a deterrent to violent crime. Many who advocate it are even willing to concede that. The death penalty has became, rather, an emblem of political authority. The death penalty serves as the ultimate statement that government - Big Government - makes about how it can control our lives. Big Government in America has so much power that it can do anything to you, and take anything from you - including your life.

This intrusive, arrogant, abusive and violent Big Government has increasingly placed itself above the wishes of the American people, not to mention above the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Indeed I would argue, as have many others, that the death penalty is unconstitutional in that it violates the 8th Amendment which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. In my opinion the imposition of the death penalty is just one of the many ways that the government is currently abrogating the Bill of Rights and placing american democracy at risk.

Now, I am sure that some here would say that the concern we must focus on is the fact that the death penalty has popular support among the American people. I agree. No doubt, it has gotten popular support because the American people feel powerless in the face of rising crime and violence. What is most significant, however, is that the death penalty has been "sold" to them as a solution by a remarkable coalition of law and order extremists and protagonist of liberal Big Government, like president Bill Clinton.

Unusual coalitions - like the one backing the death penalty - are the new phenomenon in American political life. Just take a look at the recently completed congressional hearings on government and law enforcements abuses in the handing of the Branch Davidian situation in Waco, Texas. The Richmond Dispatch insightfully pointed out last week that while David Koresh might not have been the messiah, he most certainly was a miracle worker. He turned law and order Republicans into civil libertarians and liberalDemocrats into the most ardent spokesperson for what is perhaps the most outrageous government abuse of the Bill of Rights in the last decade. The Davidians, after all, were summarily executed. Let us not forget that the FBI, the Department of Justice and Attorney general Jenet Reno imposed the death penalty there without even a pretense of a trial.

What does all of this have to do, though, with taking a hard look at where the anti-death penalty movement stands? I think responsibility for the fact the Big Government and the far right have won the hearts and minds of the American people on this critical issue must be laid squarely at the doorstep of the American liberal-left - ironically, those who believe most passionately in the abolition of the death penalty. In spite of those passions the liberal-left failed to stem the pro-death penalty tide. Why? I think is because the liberal-left has been unwilling to identify Big Government as a threat to civil liberties. Moreover, it has been unwilling to build a connection to the anti-Big Government movement at the political centre and as such opened the door to the popularization of rightist non solutions to a profound social crisis.

How could this have happened? For one thing, much of the liberal left seemed to believe that liberalism would last forever and would always dominate the key institutions of American political life. The election of bill Clinton in 1992 - who was pro-death penalty - was nonetheless identified as a swing back to liberalism after the Reagan-Bush era, as opposed to what actually was - a protest against the existing governmental state of affairs. The Ross Perrot movement was written of a somewhere between a fluke and the rise of neo-fascism. Thus the liberalleft failed to see the sign that traditional American political alignments were shifting and that the American people were more and more turning away from the bipartisan establishment and toward an anti-Big Government populism.

Consequently, we now see an ironic turn of events. Middle America, which has been so susceptible to arguments favouring the death penalty, is at the same time, more and more directly opposed to the intrusive, abusive, and violent Big Government welfare state that rules America. The anti-death penalty movement, for the most part, is more and more isolated from the American people and continues to turn to Bill Clinton and the pro-death penalty, anti-civil libertarian welfare state to represent its cause.

I speak to you today as an African American leader who grew up in the poor community and remains intimately tied to that community. Welfare and the welfare state - Big Government - have always been identified as our saviours, and as the sole institutional framework that protects us from destruction. Like many Americans - including many African Americans, I have come to see how misguided and manipulative this notion actually is. The welfare state is not a friend to the Black community. It is a social control mechanism, nut unlike the death penalty itself. And I am a Black leader who is simply not willing to accept a liberal Big Government welfare state - with all its arrogance, abuse and abrogation of the Bill of Rights - in exchange for a pathetic - and dissipating - safety net for my people.If we want to abolish the death penalty, we've got to abolish the welfare state. The national movement to abolish the death penalty must disengage itself from Big Government liberalism and the political institutions whic

h are so allied with it. We've got to reach out broadly to the American people and create a new antideath penalty, anti-Big Government movement which makes life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness its central and long lasting goal.