Exonerated Prisoners Are Winning the Fight Against the Death Penalty

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/174309/exonerated-prisoners-are-winning-fight-against-death-penalty?rel=emailNation#

Earlier this month, I was at the State House in Annapolis when Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley made history, erasing a centuries-old practice with the stroke of the pen. On May 2, O’Malley signed a law repealing the death penalty, making it the eighteenth state to abolish capital punishment, and the sixth state in six years, after New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Illinois and Connecticut.

Standing with me were two men who had a very personal stake in the governor’s actions: Kirk Bloodsworth and Shujaa Graham, both of whom were exonerated from death row. They are just two of the 142 death row prisoners who have been released due to their innocence over the past forty years. Shujaa was number twenty, and Kirk was number forty-eight. Along with organizers and lawmakers, such exonerated death row survivors—who spent an average of ten years on death row for crimes they did not commit—are leading the charge to halt executions throughout America.

“I killed the thing that almost killed me,” proclaimed Kirk Bloodsworth after O’Malley signed the bill. For Bloodsworth, ending the death penalty has been a twenty-eight-year mission. In 1985, Bloodsworth, an honorably discharged former Marine with a clean record, was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of 9-year-old Dawn Hamilton in Baltimore County. His conviction was overturned in 1986 amid news that the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence and he was retried and sentenced to life. Ultimately, DNA evidence freed Bloodsworth, but not before he spent nine years in Baltimore’s infamous Maryland Penitentiary, including two years on death row before. (The real killer had occupied a prison cell one floor beneath his own cell.) He was the first death row inmate in the US exonerated by genetic fingerprinting technology. Today, he is the advocacy director of Witness to Innocence, a national organization of exonerated death row survivors, and the group I lead.

Meanwhile, Shujaa Graham and co-defendant Eugene Allen, who are black, were framed for the murder of a white correctional officer in Deuel Vocational Institute in Stockton, California. Graham, who grew up on a plantation in Jim Crow-era Louisiana, later moved to California with his family and became entangled in a gang and in the juvenile justice system, landing in Soledad Prison at eighteen. While institutionalized, Graham taught himself to read and write. He was mentored by the Black Panthers and became a political activist in the Black Prison movement. For that, he was framed for murder.