Margaret Summers's Open Salon Blog

Dr. Mario Obledo: A Leader in Death Penalty Abolition

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 10:11:21 -0500

This Veterans Day week, I’ve been remembering my first impressions of civil rights leader, death penalty abolitionist, and Korean War veteran, Dr. Mario Guerra Obledo. He was courtly. Reserved. Quiet. Polite. Respectful. I don’t remember his exact height, but to me he stood far above everyone around him.

One of 12 children born to Mexican immigrants in San Antonio, Texas, Dr. Obledo enlisted in the Navy in 1951, serving on a ship in radar technology. After the war, Dr. Obledo went back to his home state. He earned his undergraduate degree in pharmacy from the University of Texas in Austin, and later, his law degree from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio.

Like many veterans of color, Dr. Obledo returned from fighting a war for democracy and freedom in another country to find that such rights and freedoms were not always upheld for people of color in the United States. Pete Tijerina, another Latino war veteran, returned from combat with an idea to start a civil rights organization in support of Latinos. He met Dr. Obledo at a social function. With help from a $2.2 million dollar Ford Foundation grant and assistance from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the two veterans founded MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. MALDEF launched Dr. Obledo’s civil rights activism.

Years later, when I met Dr. Obledo in the mid-1980s, he was the President of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization. I was a reporter, covering Congress for a local Washington, D.C. radio station. I interviewed him during that period after his news conferences or his testimony before Congressional hearings concerning racism against Latinos or U.S. immigration policy reform.

I wasn’t involved in the death penalty abolition movement yet, so I had no idea that Dr. Obledo was an abolitionist. He worked diligently to end the death penalty in California, where the National Coalition of Hispanic Organizations, which he headed and co-founded, is based, and in other states where it is still practiced.

Ten years ago, in his capacity as the President of the Coalition, Dr. Obledo signed an open letter to President Clinton, calling for a moratorium on federal executions. Other signers included leaders of the ACLU, NAACP, the National Organization for Women, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. The December 4, 2000 letter was a response to a Department of Justice survey of the federal death penalty authorization process. The survey revealed that, of the federal capital defendants against whom the Attorney General authorized seeking the death penalty, 69% were Hispanic and African American (18% and 51% respectively), while only 25% were white.

“We are aware of your support for the death penalty under some circumstances and we are not asking that you change your long-held position,” the letter read in part. “We are asking only that you prevent an unconscionable event in American history — executing individuals while the government is still determining whether gross unfairness has led to their death sentences.

In 2006, Dr. Obledo served on the advisory board of the American Bar Association Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, which examined whether the death penalty was administered fairly and with due process. To the extent flaws were identified in states’ death penalty systems, states could use the Project’s findings in reforming their systems, impose moratoriums, and/or launch more comprehensive self-examinations of death penalty-related laws and processes. The Project examined death penalty systems in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.

While on the advisory board, Dr. Obledo illustrated how racial and economic disparities in the application of death sentences stem from years of racial and economic discrimination. “I think they should do away with the death penalty,” he said. “Most people convicted are minorities. People of color, or minorities. Only the poor people get executed. The people with money never get executed. That’s why the system should be changed. You would make sure no injustice would occur.”

As is the case with African Americans, Latinos are often disproportionately represented on death row. Approximately 11% of death row prisoners nationally are Latino, while Latinos comprise 15% of the U.S. population. In California, the percentage of Latinos sentenced to death and incarcerated on death row is increasing. According to a report by ACLU of Northern California, “Death in Decline 2009” Latinos comprised 50% of new death sentences in 2007, 38% of death sentences in 2008, and 31% of death sentences in 2009. There is no documented information regarding what is behind these troubling statistics. However, the report notes that the lack of Latinos on California’s juries and the sentencing decisions made by California’s District Attorneys might be among the driving factors.

Dr. Obledo’s contributions to death penalty abolition and civil rights were many. Dr. Obledo died suddenly this August after a heart attack at age 78. While others undoubtedly remember and laud Dr. Obledo for his civil rights activism in LULAC, MALDEF and the National Coalition of Hispanic Organizations, I will always remember, and appreciate, his having devoted a portion of his busy life trying to end the barbaric, racially and economically biased and ineffective crime-fighting tool that is capital punishment.

Gone Too Soon: Honoring Homicide Victims

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:09:08 -0400

It is beyond difficult to lose a loved one to murder. The horror of a spouse, child, sibling, parent or other relative’s life abruptly ended by a single, violent act is a trauma that lasts forever. I know; I’ve had friends who have lost loved ones in that manner. I lost an uncle and a cousin that way.

In the absence of loved ones, lost to homicide, what’s left are a constant pain, grief, heartache and trauma imposed upon the surviving family by the violent behavior of another human being. The yawning void threatens to swallow one up every day, the void that used to be filled by someone now gone forever. Sometimes one forgets, and picks up the phone to call that person with whom one shared a laugh, made plans to go out for “movie night,” or catch up on family news. Then suddenly, it all comes back; no one will answer the phone; the voice one always looked forward to hearing with joy and anticipation, is eternally stilled.

Everything one sees underscores that loss. Parents of murdered children remember them when they see parents with strollers in the park, or hear the happy shouts of little ones at play. The spouse left behind feels remorse when watching couples holding hands. Wherever one turns, there is the reminder that the son who dreamed of becoming an astronaut is forever denied the dream, or the murdered parent will never again attend PTA meetings or volunteer for school activities.

Murder decimates not only families and friends, but also entire communities. Murder rips away our teachers, our doctors and nurses, our police officers, our sanitation workers, everyone who once made a significant contribution to our neighborhoods. As the title of a song Stevie Wonder sings has it, they are “Gone Too Soon.”

The annual National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims on September 25 gives us all the opportunity to remember those lost to homicide, and honor their memories. Cities and states hold programs, workshops and other events focusing on the impact of murder on families and communities, the issues survivors of homicide victims face, and ways to better support and serve survivors.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty has long had the participation of family members of murder victims on its Board of Directors and in its states’ Affiliates. They have insisted that their murdered loved ones would not have wanted their killers executed in their names. However, they recognized that in the national debate over capital punishment, the needs of homicide victims’ survivors are sometimes unintentionally overlooked. NCADP’s new program, Rachel’s Fund, is designed to strengthen the bonds between the abolition movement and families of murder victims and of death row prisoners, so that together we may help create effective policies that prevent violent crime, ensure our communities’ safety, and assist victims’ survivors.

This National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims, let’s take the time to honor the memories of those lost to homicide, and embrace the theme of the day, “Remember; Remind; Respect”:

Remember: The happiness and joy the deceased loved ones brought to all of us;

Remind: Our memories of murder victims remind us of our loss;

Respect: For the lives of murdered loved ones, the rights of their survivors as co-victims, and for justice.

For more information about NCADP's Rachel's Fund Program, please visit http://www.ncadp.org/rachelsfund.

Lay This Burden Down: Labor Day and Death Row Personnel

Sun, 5 Sep 2010 14:09:56 -0400

This Labor Day weekend, I was thinking about emotionally taxing and stressful professions. I concluded that working on death row falls into that category.

I was reminded of the film “Monster’s Ball” and the prison executioner played by actor Billy Bob Thornton. The character displays a “tough” demeanor to the public. He’s all business, a stoic professional doing his duty. But after each execution, in the privacy of his home, he vomits. Ice cream is the only food he can keep down. Heath Ledger plays Thornton’s son, a member of the execution team. More disturbed by the executions than his father, Ledger’s character unexpectedly pulls his revolver out of its holster one day and kills himself.

Real-life responses similar to those of “Monster’s Ball’s” main characters were documented in the mid-Twentieth Century years of U.S. executions. New York veteran executioner John Hulbert served in the infamous Sing Sing prison from 1913 to 1926. One night, according the Village Voice, Hulbert collapsed shortly before he was to pull the electric chair’s switch. After the prison’s doctor revived him, he completed the execution, and then spent a week in the prison’s hospital. Hulbert quit in 1926, saying, “I got tired of killing people.” Three years later, he shot himself in the basement of his home.

In the 1950s, Dow B. Hover became the state’s sixth executioner. The Columbia County sheriff earned $150 for every execution he conducted at Sing Sing. He occasionally conducted New Jersey’s executions. In the Village Voice article, Hover’s daughter Gladys recalled his severe, daily migraine headaches that no medicine could relieve. His son, Dow C. Hover, said, “He felt bad about (his job).” “He’d go see a minister and straighten himself out.” At the age of 89, Dow B. Hover killed himself in his car, his garage filled with exhaust fumes.

More recent research and anecdotes from death row personnel underscore the emotional strain of the work. The book “Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions,” published in 2000 by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, contains insightful interviews with death row employees whose responses to executions included depression, nightmares and emotional numbness.

Michael Osofsky’s 2001 study of 50 death row employees in Louisiana’s Angola prison, found they had mixed emotions about their job. Some didn’t feel they were acting out of revenge when they executed condemned prisoners, or that they were on a “mission” to do so. They described themselves as “soldiers of the court,” carrying out judges’ and juries’ wishes. They made it a point to treat the death row prisoners well, no matter what crimes they committed.

Many were religious, and took advantage of the warden’s Christian prayer session held about a half hour before each execution. Some worried about their salvation due to having participated in executions, and looked to scripture and clergy for answers. Other team members said executions caused them anxiety.

Osofsky’s study found that the execution team members seldom discussed their work at home with their spouses or other family members. Many felt closer to fellow team members than to their own families. Divorce rates among the team members were higher than the national average: 75% compared to 50%. They rarely sought help from mental health professionals or psychiatrists, and they had few opportunities for what Osofsky called “post-execution catharsis.”

Ron McAndrew, a former Florida prison warden who conducted three electric-chair executions in that state, and shadowed five lethal-injection executions in Texas, used to be among the death row prison personnel who thought of his work as a profession, similar to execution team members in Osofsky’s study. Until he began to have nightmares.

“My change of heart was gradual and painful,” McAndrew wrote in a 2009 Orlando Sentinel article. “At night I would awaken to visions of executed inmates sitting on the edge of my bed.

“Part of my job was to help strap prisoners into the electric chair, and signal the hooded executioner to administer the current. But each execution lessened my support. In Texas, I thought the more ‘civilized’ executions by lethal injection would remove my repugnance. They didn't.”

This year, McAndrew testified before a New Hampshire study commission on the death penalty that he and many former death row personnel discussed the traumatizing effects of executions. "We spent hours on the phone, trying to process the horror we went through,” said McAndrew, quoted by the Associated Press. “We never admitted it at the time. That would have shown weakness in a job that demanded strength."

“Showing weakness” versus “strength” was a factor in lawsuits filed by two former South Carolina prison employees against the state’s corrections department. Terry Bracey and Ira Craig Baxley said they were forced to perform executions or face demotions and lose their leadership positions within the prison. Both men, who retired on disability in 2007, said they were not adequately trained to conduct executions, and received no counseling. Bracey said he suffered nightmares, emotional disturbances, and a desire to wash his hands after executions. Baxley experienced “emotional upset and religious and ethical conflict.” A psychologist diagnosed Baxley with generalized anxiety disorder caused by conducting executions.

U.S. District Court Judge Cameron Currie ruled against Bracey this March, and threw out Baxley’s lawsuit this April. In the ruling against Bracey, Judge Currie wrote in part, “At most, he was given a difficult choice with emotional repercussions. . . Jobs, particularly jobs in the field of law enforcement, sometimes require tough choices." The judge ruled Baxley’s argument -- that his free speech right was violated when he told his supervisor he did not want to execute prisoners -- was not strong enough. Bracey's lawsuit continues; Baxley's effectively ended with Judge Currie’s ruling. Attorney Lewis Cromer of Columbia, South Carolina, who represents both men, told the city’s newspaper The State that he would appeal the ruling in Baxley’s case.

"I just feel when you condition a man's job on killing people . . . it's clearly outrageous and intolerable in a civilized society," said Cromer.

During the nation’s current economic recession, most that have a job are fortunate and grateful. But if our country would only abandon the death penalty and replace it with an alternative punishment, prison personnel serving on death rows could lay down their emotional and psychological burden, which comes with killing people for a living. It’s too high a price to pay for employment.

Tears Are Not Enough to End the Death Penalty

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:07:30 -0400

Friends and family often ask me if being employed in an organization focused on abolishing capital punishment depresses me. A reporter even asked me if we death penalty abolitionists ever smile or laugh, or if we are always grim given the work that we do.

Usually I just answer that abolitionists are human with the same emotions as everyone else, and I go about my business. Recently, however, an Internet article I read at work had me sobbing quietly in front of my computer screen.

The article was about Ronnie Lee Gardner, the Utah death row prisoner executed by firing squad in June for murdering attorney Michael Burdell during an attempt to escape a courthouse, and imprisonment. It briefly described Gardner’s horrific childhood rife with abuse, including sexual abuse, and neglect, a life that was not detailed during his trial.

Reading about Gardner’s life, if one could call it that, moved me to tears. It was so typical of the lives of most death row prisoners. So many were victimized children; despised, ignored, deserted, born to substance-abusing young people too poor, uneducated and immature to parent correctly. Alternately, many death row prisoners had no parents, and were left with people who were cruel, who mistreated them, and/or didn’t care a thing about them. Considering their circumstances, is it any wonder that they’ve grown up – more like struggled up – to become severely damaged adults living in a world of hurt? They remind me of the t-shirt slogan popular with the youths of the 1980s: “Kill me, because I’m dead already” – a sentiment expressing the ultimate in learned self-rejection and self-hate.

Lest you think I’m a naïve “bleeding heart,” I was crying for the murder victims and their families, too. I have lost family members – an uncle and a cousin – to murder. I understand family members of murder victims' expection that executing someone responsible for taking away our loved ones forever, someone who has caused us unending grief, will give us emotional resolution. I also understand the profound disappointment when the grief doesn’t stop and the healing doesn’t occur in the minutes, months and even years, after the murderer is put to death.

People who kill should be punished, but killing broken individuals is not the way. The death penalty is ineffective in deterring homicides, and does not even begin to address the reasons why people whose lives are like Gardner’s would kill. For every person we execute, there’s another mistreated, neglected, abandoned child out there with the potential to become prison fodder.

After a few minutes, I dried my eyes, remembering the title of a song recorded years ago by Canadian artists about ending famine in Ethiopia: “Tears Are Not Enough.” Crying changes nothing. Instead, let’s work on reforming criminal justice. Let’s take the money wasted on capital punishment and spend it on programs that save children at-risk, preventing them from becoming the next Ronnie Lee Gardner. Let’s take the money and fund more substance abuse prevention and rehabilitation programs. Let’s spend it on support programs that assist families of murder victims, entities which, unlike the death penalty, really help them heal and reconstruct their lives. Let's work together to end the flawed criminal justice policy of capital punishment, replacing it with viable alternative punishments that keep out communities safe from harm. Let’s finally and forever obliterate that world of hurt the death penalty creates for people who kill as well as for their victims’ families.

Swimming against the Death Penalty

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:06:14 -0400

What would prompt someone to spend a beautiful summer day in July diving into and swimming the chilly, choppy, dangerous waters between “The Rock” – the former maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island – and the foot of the San Francisco Bay Bridge?

For Lynn Greer, 41, it’s the prospect of generating money for Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (VADP), a statewide citizens’ organization dedicated to ending capital punishment in that state. Greer, a member of VADP’s Board of Directors, plans to fundraise, and focus public attention on the issue of innocent people being wrongfully convicted and executed, by participating in the July 18, 2010 Alcatraz Challenge Aquathlon & Alcatraz Challenge Swim.

The annual Alcatraz Challenge Aquathlon & Alcatraz Challenge Swim, sponsored by Tri-California Events, Inc., is a USA Triathlon-sanctioned swimming and running competition. Greer chose the event as the vehicle for her fundraising and public education effort.

Greer’s goal is to raise contributions in recognition of each of the 138 prisoners exonerated from death row since 1973 due to their innocence. Beginning at 8 a.m. Pacific Time on July 18, Greer will navigate the extremely strong ocean current around Alcatraz and swim 1.5 miles to the East Beach of Crissy Field in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area’s Presidio Park.

Undaunted by the rough, freezing waters, Greer looks forward to the challenge. “The last time I participated in this event 10 years ago, I completed the entire triathlon in less than four hours,” she says. “It is not for novices. This time, I am just focusing on the swim.” She trains by swimming five to seven miles a week in the Washington, D.C. area.

Greer may be swimming against physical tides, but the “tide” of public and criminal justice opinion is gradually turning against capital punishment, especially with respect to wrongful convictions and executions. In a recent Rasmussen Reports opinion poll, 73 percent said they are concerned about innocent people executed by mistake, with 40 percent saying they are “very concerned.”

Moreover, in 2009, the American Law Institute (ALI), the leading independent scholarly institute providing support for legal theories that undergird state criminal justice systems, removed the death penalty from its Model Penal Code. Among other things, the ALI cited the minimal safeguards against mistaken convictions and executions.

Greer notes that of the 35 states that still have the death penalty on their books, Virginia is second only to Texas in the number of executions carried out between 1976 and 2009 (Texas 460; Virginia 107). Moreover, she says, California, site of the athletic challenge, has a death row population of 690, but executions in the state are currently on hold due to legal challenges regarding its three-drug lethal injection execution protocol.

“Virginia and the other states implementing the death penalty should end it,” asserts Greer. “It is a fatally flawed public policy which puts innocent people at risk for wrongful conviction and execution. By swimming in the Alcatraz Challenge, I expect to increase public awareness regarding the innocence issue.”

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For more information about Lynn Greer’s swim against the death penalty, visit her web page at http://www.firstgiving.com/lynn_greer.