I picked up this photograph while antiquing last year. I didn’t recognize the young man’s name or know of his legal case. I was just struck by the photograph. Later, I did some research to educate myself about what happened to him. Predictably, it was another miscarriage of justice. You can read more about his story here and here

“Emaciated and frail, more than 100 men lie on concrete floors of freezing, solitary cells in Guantánamo, silently starving themselves to death.

Stripped of all possessions, even basics such as a sleeping mat or soap, they lie listlessly as guards periodically bang on the steel doors and shout at them to move an arm or leg to prove they are still conscious.”

These are the opening words of an article that I read last weekend about Guantanamo prison hunger strikers. I felt sick to my stomach as I continued to read but made myself do it anyway.

Then I came across an article about Willie Manning’s impending execution in Mississippi:

“Mississippi is still scheduled to execute a convicted murderer Tuesday despite a lack of physical evidence tying him to the crime and a new admission from the Department of Justice that the forensic investigation was severely flawed.

Willie Jerome Manning, a 44-year-old African-American man, has been in prison for almost 20 years after being convicted for the 1992 kidnapping and murder of Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller, two white college students in Mississippi.”

At the last minute, a court granted Mr. Manning a temporary stay of execution. I took a deep breath and exhaled conscious of the fact that his state-sanctioned murder was only postponed for the time being.

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In the early morning of November 1945, Willie McGee allegedly broke into the house of Mr and Mrs. Troy Hawkins. Mrs. Wilette Hawkins, a 32 year old mother of three, was raped while her 2 year old daughter slept in the bed beside her. The case became a cause celebre drawing people across the world to speak out and act on behalf of the man accused of the crime: Willie McGee.

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Image by Ricardo Levins Morales

I am still working toward writing something about Johnny Cash. In the meantime, here’s Johnny’s cover of Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat.” The song is a commentary on the death penalty.

On Tuesday, the state of Texas executed Marvin Wilson, a man who still sucked his thumb at 54 years old. The state did this in all of our names…

I bought a set of negatives at a flea market about 10 years ago. They were photographs of anti-death penalty protestors at San Quentin Prison on May 13, 1960. Looking at these images actually gives me hope because they remind me that people have always been organizing against the death penalty. It means that some of us aren’t blind to the barbarity and brutality of state-sanctioned murder.

I have complex feelings about the NAACP. On the one hand, it is impossible to imagine where I would be as a black woman in the 21st century without its contributions to the movement for racial justice. In the early 20th century, the organization led a long-term campaign against lynching and during the civil rights era it fought successfully to desegregate schools and public accommodations. On the other hand, time and again I have come across stories about the NAACP turning down the cases of people of color who were not perceived to be “model” clients.

I recently came across the story of a young black man named “Jerry Newson” as I was doing some research about false police confessions. Newson was an 18 year old young man living in Oakland who was accused and convicted of murdering two people in 1948. The case apparently became a sensation at the time.

On October 22 1948, two people were found in a drug store shot through the head “execution-style.” The victims were a pharmacist named Robert Savage (who was white) and his clerk Marjorie Ruth Wilson (who was a light-skinned black woman). The police were quoted at the time as suggesting that the motive for the murders was robbery and that about $600 was missing from the store. This crime shocked the West Oakland community and a number of local resources were deployed to apprehend the culprit(s). The police were under pressure to solve the case and after a few days, they settled on Jerry Newson as the prime suspect for the crime.

Newson was born in 1931 in Louisiana. He came to live with his aunt and uncle in Oakland in 1944. He quit school in the 11th grade and leased a shoe shine stand at the corner of 11th and Broadway.

On October 25, 1949, two police officers J.J. Murphy and John H. Strum found Jerry Newson in a local poolhall and told him that they had some questions for him. They were investigating a robbery that had occurred on October 13th at the Harbor Home projects. The robber had gotten away with $1275 dollars. Jerry admitted immediately that he had in fact robbed the rent office of the Harbor Home projects. The robbery was described as follows:

“Jerry had entered the rent office on October 13 in broad daylight wearing a loud colored shirt. Once in the office, he brandished an empty .45 automatic, belonging to his Uncle James, and ordered the money turned over to him.”

He later told the policemen about the gun, “I forgot to put the cartridges in.” Jerry Newson was no master criminal: he left fingerprints at the scene of the robbery and could be easily identified by the victims of the robbery.

During his questioning about the Harbor Home robbery, the police discovered that Jerry Newson had been acquainted with both Robert Savage and Marjorie Wilson. In fact, he had shined Mr. Savage’s shoes and had “bought barbecue for Marjorie.” The police saw an opening and secured a “confession” about the murders from Jerry.

His lawyer, Robert Treuhaft, offers this account of Newson’s alleged “confession”:

They started interrogating him about the murder, and he said, oh yes, he knew Doc Savage the pharmacist, and he’d been in the drugstore lots of times. They were old friends of his. So they said, “Well, did you do it?” He said, “No, no. I was a friend of Doc’s.” They said, “Well, where were you?” Well, he had an alibi. But he’d been with a friend named Harris. So they went out and arrested Harris. They both denied everything, but they kept them for another week under interrogation with no lawyer; and then took Newson to Berkeley for a lie detector test. Berkeley had the equipment; and they had a man there, Inspector Riedel, who supposedly knew how to use it.

So, what actually happened was that he was in this contraption for some time, totally new to him, and the questions kept coming in a dozen different forms, did you do it, did you do it. And finally he said, “You want me to say I did it. I did it. Let me go home now.” So the press, a dozen reporters, were outside the room waiting for the word, and Inspector Riedel said, “He confessed.” So they all rush in and Riedel says, “Would you write this down?” And he says, “What do you mean? I was kidding. I didn’t do it.” Well, that was the sum total confession.

The first time that Jerry Newson saw an attorney was on October 30th, five days after his arrest. Robert Treuhaft was a Civil Rights Congress attorney whose wife had approached Newson’s family with an offer to help. The first words that Newson said to him were: “I don’t know whether I need a lawyer, I told them all about the Harbor Homes robbery the day they arrested me, and I didn’t do the murders. So what do I need a lawyer for?” Little did Jerry know what he was in store for him. He also told Treuhaft that he had been placed in solitary confinement, interrogated for 18 straight hours, and only been given one bowl of mush during the entire time of his incarceration.

Newson was tried and ultimately convicted of first degree murder on May 18,1950. He was sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin.

After the trial, Truehaft was contacted by a couple of technicians in the Oakland Police Department who wanted to speak off the record about the firearm evidence. Truehaft explained:

“They called me up and said, “Don’t, whatever you do, let that firearms evidence get out of the courtroom. Make sure that it is preserved.” So then they met with Bert and me privately, in our office. “We know our business,” they said. “We could not find a match. There are always accidental matches. They sent this evidence over to this big-shot in San Francisco, a hot-shot expert. When he couldn’t find a match, they took it away from him and they sent it to this guy in Berkeley. When we heard that he claimed that he had a match, we said we’d like to see it. And we went out to his laboratory, and we rotated the bullets and we couldn’t see it. He had an assistant show us. We only saw what one called `accidentals,’ which you see anytime but which disappear when you rotate the bullets.

“Those photographs though are absolutely phony. That white line doesn’t exist. There’s supposed to be a hairline within the microscope that separates the two fields. We asked him [Kirk] why there was no hairline, why they had to draw the line in by pencil — he said, well, something was wrong with the equipment, and we got this white space in between. Then he drew his pencil lines in such a way that instead of separating the two fields as a properly adjusted hairline should, it goes through the edge of the field of one bullet. When you do that, it’s obvious that everything on either side of the line will match.”

“I’ll never forget those men, Fuller and Davis, good Catholics, who put their jobs on the line by giving us affidavits for use on our motion for a new trial. We lost on the motion for a new trial. Death penalty cases go directly to the State Supreme Court. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction, not on the firearms evidence, but on other grounds, and ordered a new trial. Well, having won on the Supreme Court was a tremendous victory. The guy had been in death row for about a year.”

Jerry Newson was not set free after the Supreme Court reversed his conviction. There were two more trials (with the third trial ending in a hung jury). Truehaft recounts what happened next:

And so, after three trials, the murder charges were dismissed. But Newson didn’t go free. He had pleaded guilty to the earlier offense — robbery of the housing project. For a first offense, an eighteen-year-old would usually get a maximum of five years and he would be out in a year and a half. Well, he was kept in jail for eleven years on that robbery conviction. Every time he came up for parole, Coakley would warn the Parole Board, “This man’s a killer, we know he’s a killer. Something went wrong in his trial, but it’s your responsibility. If you let him out, you’re letting a killer out, a murderer.” And the parole authority never did grant parole. Finally, we went to Court, and finally prevailed on a writ of habeas corpus. But anyway, it’s a long, long history, and it was fascinating.

I had certainly never heard of Jerry Newson and the story is indeed a fascinating one. But it was this sentence that really stayed with me from Truehaft’s account: “The NAACP had refused to take the case. I’d gone to them. I went to a meeting of the executive board, and I said, “Look, we need you in this case.” They said, “We don’t represent murderers.”

Occupying Mumia’s Cell
Copyright©2011 by Alice Walker

I Sing of Mumia
brilliant and strong
and of the captivity
that
few black men escape
if they are as free
as he has become.

What a teacher he is for all of us.

Nearly thirty years in solitary
and still,
Himself.

He will die himself.
A black man;
whom many consider to be
a Muslim, though this is not
how he narrows down
the criss-crossing paths of
his soul’s journey.
Perhaps it is simpler
to call him
a lover of truth
who refuses
to be silenced.
Is anything more persecuted
in this land?

No boots will be allowed
of course
so he will not
die with them on;
but there will always be
boots
of the mind and spirit
and of the heart and soul.

His will be black and shining
(or maybe the color of rainbows)
and they will sprout wings.

Mumia
they have decided
finally
not to kill you
hoping no blood will
stain their hands
at the tribunal
of the people;
but to let you continue
to die slowly
creating and singing
your own songs
as you pace
alone, sometimes terrorized,
for decades of long nights
in your small cage
of a cell.

We lament our impotence: that we have failed
to get you out of there.

Your regal mane may have thinned
as our locks too, those flags of our self sovereignty, may even have
disappeared;
waiting out this unjust sentence,
until we, like you, have become old.
Still,
if you will: accept our gratitude
that you stand, even bootless,
on your feet. We see
that few of those around us,
well shod and walking, even owning, the streets
are freed.

Somehow you have been.

Enough to remind us
of freedom’s devout
internal and
ineradicable seed.

What a magnificent Lion
you have been all these
disastrous years
and still are,
indeed.

Yesterday came the news that the prosecution has decided to drop the death penalty against Mumia Abu Jamal. For many who have been working on his case for decades, I know that there is a mixture of relief mingled with sadness. After all, he will now have to spend life in prison without the possibility of parole. In my opinion, this is still a capital sentence and the state has once again prevailed in sanctioning death.

I am not an expert in Mumia Abu Jamal’s case. From the limited amount that I do know, there seems to be reasonable doubt about his guilt. My purpose here is not to litigate the facts of his case. Instead, I want to suggest that the sentence of life without the possibility of parole is more insidious than and as detrimental as capital punishment. This may strike some readers as an absurd assertion but bear with me as I explain my rationale.

The following is a paragraph from a Washington Post article about the prosecution’s decision in the Abu Jamal case:

While the decision follows decades of protests and public appeals, Wednesday’s decision appears not to be a result of activist or lawyer action. Instead, the widow of slain officer Daniel Faulkner has reportedly persuaded prosecutors to stop pushing for the death penalty, saying she was tired of the constant reminders of her husband’s death.

So in order to move on with her life, Ms. Faulkner convinced prosecutors to drop the death penalty against Mumia Abu Jamal. The Post article provides more context for her decision:

Maureen Faulkner waited nearly 30 years for her husband’s murderer to be executed. But following a seemingly endless cycle of legal appeals, she said she realized it would never happen.

On Wednesday, Faulkner gave her blessing to the decision by Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams to stop pursuing the death penalty for Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose claim that he was the victim of a racist legal system made him an international cause celebre.

“My family and I have endured a three-decade ordeal at the hands of Mumia Abu-Jamal, his attorneys and his supporters, who in many cases never even took the time to educate themselves about the case before lending their names, giving their support and advocating for his freedom,” Maureen Faulkner said. “All of this has taken an unimaginable physical, emotional and financial toll on each of us.”

Essentially after 30 years of legal challenges, Ms. Faulkner became convinced that Abu Jamal would never be executed so she has seemingly reconciled herself to the fact that he would instead spend the rest of his life in prison. I have the deepest sympathy for this woman who lost her husband to an unspeakable act of violence. It is awful. Full stop.

I often hear friends of mine who oppose the death penalty argue that prisoners “would suffer more” if they had to spend the rest of their days locked in cells. This argument is used as a way to entice people to support the abolishment of the death penalty which is described as barbaric, capricious, and unjust. The truth is that for me, it is more barbaric to cage people until they die in prison. This is usually an excruciatingly slow and soul-killing way to die. Life without parole is, in my opinion, a de facto death sentence. What is the practical difference between being executed in prison and being condemned to spending the rest of your days in a cage? It appears that Mrs. Faulkner has come to the ultimate decision (after all of these years) that life in prison is basically as good as a death sentence. It has the added benefit of keeping the case out of the headlines for the foreseable future.

In countless cases (less publicized than Abu Jamal’s), prisoners who are sentenced to life without parole do not have international campaigns launched on their behalf. I venture to say that if Mumia Abu Jamal had been sentenced to life without parole in the first place as opposed to death, he might not have gained the international notoriety that he has. Being spared from state-sanctioned murder has a way of diminishing the fervor of crusaders and activists. Usually those sentenced to life without parole (even unjustly) will be forgotten as they are relegated to the unseen caverns of our prisons. Therein lies the horror.

Thanks to my friend Jane for sending this along to me. This video makes the connection between lynching, racism, and the current practice of state-sanctioned killing.