O'DELL: THE SUPREME COURT SUSPENDS THE EXECUTION. COMMITTEES FOR THE UNIVERSAL ABOLITION OF THE DEATH PENALTY SHOULD IMMEDIATELY BE SET UP IN THE US AND ALL OVER THE WORLD

Brussels, 18 December 1996. The US Supreme Court has suspended O'Dell's execution. A first significant step to modify the rule preventing to produce evidence after the trial's end. That is also a further step in fostering in the US as well as the rest of the world a civil, reformist international movement for the abolishment of the death penalty, a movement avoiding any ethical definition of guilt or innocence. All over the world capital punishment should become an unpleasent recollection of the past, and all the more reason in democratic countries.

It is a question of refusing any ethical approach to the definition of capital punishment. The movement gathered around O'Dell's petition of mercy has now the civil duty to organize and find out those political ways so that starting from O'Dell's case the definition af a new criminal law would be achieved. No more petitions of mercy or executions' suspension demanded just because the sentenced is manifestly innocent, but the affirmation of a new actual law that simply excluding the death penalty, at any rate, for any crime.

Transnational Radical Party