Editorial
March 1999

Under the whip of the punitive state

So intense was mass hatred against the religious Right orchestrating an attempted coup that the Senate backed down from removing Clinton from office. While far Right mouthpieces like William Bennett complained about the public's low morals, the truth is that people recognized the threat to freedom for all if morality can be dictated by a few self-appointed sex police.

However the punitive state which the right wing has shaped and which mounted a grand inquisition against Clinton is still in the business of stealing freedom. For as different as Clinton is from the working people in the U.S., the same punitive state which prosecuted Clinton for most of 1998 has been instilling fear into the lives of many of lesser means for a lot longer. And notwithstanding the prosecution he was subjected to, Clinton was the victim of a crusade of his own making, having contributed to the atmosphere of punishment as an advocate of the death penalty and as an architect of this country's prison gulag. That atmosphere has been reinforced by the punishment meted out by sanctions on the Iraqi masses, forgotten during the spectacle of impeachment and the Senate trial.

The current incarnation of the punitive state took on the face of Kenneth Starr when he was hired to investigate the Whitewater land deal and he has been investigating Clinton ever since. The special prosecutor law under which he was appointed originally was passed by Congress two decades ago to insulate the special prosecutor from political firings of the kind Nixon attempted during the investigation into the Watergate scandal and his grab for single-party rule. When it was to the advantage of the far Right, the special prosecutor law has been a conduit for appointee Kenneth Starr to exercise unlimited powers and help the religious Right stage a power grab of its own.

The House body that impeached Clinton is well-practiced in punishing the accused regardless of civil liberties. It includes 65 former prosecutors including all the House managers in the Senate trial. Thus the path to political success is littered with the ruined lives of many.

VICTIMS OF STATE AGGRESSION

In an unprecedented break from unquestioned state authority, DuPage County (Illinois) prosecutors and sheriffs will be tried for cheating to get two innocent men, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, convicted for murder. Pretrial hearings opened just as the Chicago Tribune exposed a national scandal, namely that prosecutors routinely cheat, often knowingly putting innocent people on Death Rows across the country. Known cases amount to 381.

The rule of unjust law prevails though. Best known as one whom the punitive state wants to make an example is Mumia Abu-Jamal. A revolutionary and political prisoner, he was framed for killing a Philadelphia cop in 198l and sentenced to death. The very same Judge Sabo who presided over the original trial presided over subsequent appeals and has ruled out new evidence in Mumia's favor, honoring every prerogative of the prosecutors. No sitting judge has sentenced more people to death than Sabo.

At least two U.S. mayors who were once prosecutors have built their political careers on law-and-order policies. When Anthony Porter was released in February after 16 years on the Illinois death row, one of the first things we were reminded was that the prosecutor at the time, Richard M. Daley, used any means necessary to win a conviction and contributed to the atmosphere of wrongful convictions that now has resulted in 11 being released from the Illinois Death Row.

The atmosphere of punishment has become a policy of fascism in New York thanks to paramilitary death squads roaming the streets, commissioned by Mayor "Adoph" Giuliani. One of these squads picked out a Black immigrant, Amadou Diallo, and mowed him down in front of his home. It was a wrongful execution where justice was not manipulated, but rather dispensed with altogether.

RESISTING THE LORD HIGH PROSECUTORS

Thanks to community movements in solidarity with the wrongfully convicted and political prisoners, the punitive dictates of prosecutors are meeting resistance. Socially conscious journalism students discovered evidence that exonerated Porter, and daily protests are taking place in New York City over the Diallo execution.

At the three-day National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and The Death Penalty in November in Chicago, living testimony to the need to smash the punitive state was presented in one poignant session. One after another, Rolando Cruz and 27 others among the country's 73 men and two women released from Death Rows introduced themselves. They stated the dates of their wrongful convictions and confinements, and concluded, "If the state of Illinois had its way, I would be dead now," or Florida, or Texas, and so on.

The most striking aspect of the conference was the growing challenge to the prerogative of those self-appointed to kill. It could be seen most strongly in the participation of those, like Louva G. Bell, mother of Ronald Kitchen whose tortured confession at the hands of infamous Chicago cop Jon Burge led to a wrongful murder conviction. Nine other of Burge's victims languish on death row. It was recently reported that prosecutors covered up evidence of forced confessions.

In light of the Senate vote not to remove Clinton, some have waxed nauseatingly about the Constitution's protections against single-party dictates. Meanwhile the death penalty, adjudged constitutional after a brief moratorium in the 1970s, is imposed without care on the innocent and carried out disproportionately on the poor, Black and Latino. Taking that prerogative away from an ever more punitive state is the goal of a growing mass movement.