This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Reserve the death penalty for lying cops and prosecutors!

The USA Today ran an excellent article on the death penalty November 13
about 30 wrongfully convicted people from death row now going to attend
an academic conference on the subject. " Since the Supreme Court
reinstated the death penalty 22 years ago, 486 people have been
executed. Williams is one of 75 men in 19 states who have been spared
execution and freed from death row after evidence emerged showing that
they had been wrongfully convicted."(1)

Flawed implementation
The U.$. Supreme Court has already admitted that the death penalty is
applied in a racially discriminatory way. It decided that the good still
outweighed the bad in having a death penalty, thereby not prioritizing
the fight against national oppression or racism.(2)

Now there is a campaign afoot to focus on the innocent. The average
length of time that the innocent sat in prison was seven years before
s/he cleared his name,(1) but the fascists in this country want to speed
up a process known by statisticians to be racially flawed and therefore
likely flawed in other ways as well.

Motivations
Although most Amerikans are conscious of their own viciousness and
support police and prosecutors in a knee-jerk way, a minority has naive
views about police, prosecutors and judges. When MIM says that the
government is set up to protect property and that conscious and
unconscious mechanisms ensure that the judicial system is used to
oppress, the naive minority does not understand. However, an increasing
portion of the public will understand that prosecutors and elected
judges seek public office based on their success in locking people up.
As long as the headlines show a prosecutor to be successful, it does not
matter to the prosecutor if s/he locked up the wrong persyn.

In the United $tates, there are 50 states each with two U.S. Senators
and one governor. That is 150 people.  MIM conducted its own
investigation to tally up how many of these 150 are former prosecutors.
It turns out 30 were as of 1997.(3) There was also one former head of
the Department of Corrections, Governor Miller in Georgia.
Bill Clinton is a former prosecutor. Furthermore, the mayor of the
largest city -- R. Giuliani was a prosectuor just before being elected
in New York City.  Giuliani in particular had to bump aside his police
chief when the police chief tried to take credit for reducing crime.
Hence, cops too are trying to use crime to get elected. It is typical to
use the prosecutor job as a stepping stone to being mayor or governor.
Bill Clinton then went from governor to White House.

In very recent years, another motivation has appeared for cops to lie
about crime -- to get on television and make a good impression or be
famous. Legal barriers preventing television from live broadcasts of
police and suspects have fallen. Now cops have the incentive of fame to
stir something up, conspire a bit and get on television, just as the
many sick people who conspire to get on the Jerry Springer show and
other talk shows. While not all cops will have such motivations just as
not all people will do something nuts to get on television, there is a
minority that can cause plenty of trouble. We recommend the movie
"Running Man" to open the eyes of the naive.

Unconscious fascism
Almost no scholars find any point to having a death penalty in the U$A.
In fact, there have been numerous studies of the flaws of the system,
studies which never seem to be digested by the public or politicians of
the oppressor nation.

About 7 in 10 Amerikans do not believe in "innocent till proven guilty"
and instead majorities believe someone is guilty if cops seek charges.
As a result of concerns about juries, a number of studies have been
done.

One study of 1000 wrongful convictions of all types shows that about
half are attributable to eyewitness error. Different studies based on
mock crime scenes have shown that from 21 to 33 percent of all people
will point to someone in a police lineup as the culprit when the culprit
was not present.(4)

This would be a case of unconscious fascism. In academic experiments
there is no persynal reason these eyewitnesses could have for lying, but
they are just inaccurate in about a third of cases. The willingness to
finger someone is just a case of unconscious fascism, the fact that
injustice is so routine in U.$. society that people carry out injustice
as a matter of course.

Reform of the death penalty
The meeting of 30 freed death row inmates at Northwestern University
focussed on reforming or abolishing the death penalty. Illinois has had
9 freed already since 1994 and it is considering formation of a panel to
review all death row cases given its poor record. That's one kind of
reform.

MIM believes there should be another reform -- a death penalty for
attempted judicial murder. 10 people have been freed with the result of
DNA evidence. Most of the time, nothing happens to the cops, prosecutors
and judges who lied. In one case, three assistant prosecutors in
Illinois's DuPage county were charged with perjury, obstruction of
justice and conspiracy.(1) In MIM's opinion, that is not enough. They
should have been charged for attempted murder since they knew their
accusations could lead to the death penalty. In other words, as some of
the former death row innocents have said, in many cases the prosecutors
know they are prosecuting someone innocent. Attempted murder and murder
by prosecutors, cops and judges who condemn innocent men -- such should
receive the strictest penalties of all, the death penalty.

So if someone wants to become governor by falsely winning cases as a
prosecutor, he or she should also weigh the possibility he or she will
face the death penalty if caught. The existing law should be
interpreting these cases as murder and attempted murder and the penalty
for attempted murder in such cases should be death.

Alternatively, should some liberals feel bad for fascist cops,
prosecutors and judges being executed for their unjust treatment of the
innocent, they can support a different reform. They could make it
impossible for prosecutors or judges to ever run for public office.
Even then, there will still be a death penalty applied in a
discriminatory way against oppressed nationalities. Only
anti-imperialist revolution can resolve that injustice.

Notes:
1. USA Today 13Nov1998, p. 14a.
2. "In the 1987 case of McClesky v. Kemp, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld
the constitutionality of the death penalty despite evidence that killers
of whites are given the death penalty more often than killers of
blacks."John E. Conklin, Criminology, 3rd ed., (NY: MacMillan, 1989), p.
406. MIM would add that the court admitted that the anti-death penalty
lawyers proved their point.
3. Almanac of American Politics (Washington, DC: National Journal,
1998). 4. New York Times 17Jan1995, c1, c6.