Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News
Volume XVII Number 9, September 2009
UPCOMING EVENTS
Thursday, September 24, 7:30 PM. Monthly
Meeting. Caltech Y is located off San Pasqual
between Hill and Holliston, south side. You will
see two curving walls forming a gate to a path--
our building is just beyond. Help us plan future
actions on Sudan, the 'War on Terror', death
penalty and more.
Tuesday October 13, 7:30 PM. Letter writing
meeting at Caltech Athenaeum if the downstairs
Rathskeller has re-opened, otherwise at Panera
Bread coffee house, 3521 E. Foothill, Pasadena.
Please check Group 22 website for location.
This informal gathering is a great way for
newcomers to get acquainted with Amnesty.
Sunday, October 18, 6:30 PM. Rights Readers
Human Rights Book Discussion Group. Vroman's
Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena.
This month we read "The Brief and Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz.
Sunday, October 4, Monthly Movie Night.
Time and location TBD.
COORDINATOR'S CORNER
Hi everyone,
First off, I want to thank everyone for their offers
of help and support when Robert was ill over
Labor Day weekend. Gracias a Dios, he is
completely recovered. It was a pretty scary
experience, but I am thankful for the good
medical care that he received and for friends and
family.
This issue is turning out to be our China issue!
Group 22 member Laura Brown spent part of her
summer teaching in Xaioshan, China. Read of her
experiences and observations in this newsletter.
Wen Chen and Daniel Wang also have written a
piece on the volunteer human rights lawyers in
China who have assisted Falun Gong
practictioners and others.
Despite my resolution to finish Oscar Wao en
espanol before the October book group meeting, I
am less than half-way through the book! What is
interesting about this novel is that it was
originally written in English, and then translated
into Spanish. Even my Spanish teacher, who is
from Argentina and Spain, didn't know the
Dominican slang!
Con carino,
Kathy
ERITREA UPDATE
By Joyce Wolf
In last month's column I wrote about a report that
Group 22's adopted prisoner of conscience,
Estifanos Seyoum, was one of nine G-15 prisoners
who died in while in secret detention. I attributed
the report to "Assena.com", which is an incorrect
spelling of the organization's name. I apologize
for any confusion caused by my error. The
spelling is either Assenna or Asena, and the home
page of their website is
http://asena.samai.co.uk. (You can go directly
to the article about the G-15 prisoners using
http://tinyurl.com/ojgw8q.) Amnesty has not
yet confirmed the deaths of the nine G-15 POCs,
but it seems probable that the reports are correct.
My suggestion for this month's action is to
support Palo Alto Group 19's efforts for
Mattewos Habteab, an Eritrean journalist who
was arrested in the 18 September 2001
crackdown along with the G-15 POCs and other
journalists. This month is the eighth anniversary
of their arrest. Background information about
Mattewos and Eritrea is available at
www.freeeritreanjournalists.org. Here is a sample
letter that you can use as a guideline.
Mr. Simone Joseph
Foreign Affairs Officer on Africa
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor
U.S. State Department
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 205200
Dear Sir,
I am very concerned about Mattewos Habteab
and other independent journalists in Eritrea -
including Said Abdulkadir, Yosuf Mohamed Ali,
Amanuel Asrat, Temesgen Gebreyesus, Dawit
Habtemichael, Medhanie Haile Ali, Dawit Isaac,
Seyoum Tsehaye, Saleh Al-Jezaeri, and Hamid
Mohamed Said - who have been held for more
than eight years in secret detention without
charges or trial and with no access to their
families or to legal counsel. Some of them have
reportedly died in prison. Amnesty International
considers them to be prisoners of conscience,
imprisoned solely for carrying out their
journalistic duties.
I respectfully urge that US government engage in
dialogue with the Eritrean government to bring
about:
1. Eritrean authority's acknowledgement of the
journalists' detention and the disclosure of their
whereabouts.
2. An independent team visiting the prisons
where the journalists are being held and reporting
publicly on their conditions.
3. The granting of the families' visitation rights.
Thank you for your attention to this urgent
matter.
Sincerely,
[your name and address]
RIGHTS READERS
Human Rights Book Discussion Group
Keep up with Rights Readers at
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com
Next Rights Readers meeting:
Sunday, October 18, 6:30 PM
Vroman's Bookstore
695 E. Colorado Boulevard
in Pasadena
New York Times Book Review
Travails of an Outcast
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 4, 2007
Junot Diaz's "Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao" is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that
is so original it can only be described as Mario
Vargas Llosa meets "Star Trek" meets David
Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny,
street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds
from a comic portrait of a second-generation
Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on
public and private history and the burdens of
familial history. An extraordinarily vibrant book
that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose, it's
confidently steered through several decades of
history by a madcap, magpie voice that's equally
at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime
movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual
shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret
police raids in Santo Domingo.
Mr. Diaz, the author of a critically acclaimed
collection of short stories published in 1996
("Drown"), writes in a sort of streetwise brand of
Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader
can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-
dazzle talk, lots of body language on the
sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque
footnotes and asides. And he conjures with
seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his
characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the
ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their
nightmares and their dreams; and America (a k a
New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and
not-so-shiny possibilities that they've fled to as
part of the great Dominican diaspora.
Oscar, Mr. Diaz's homely homeboy hero, is
"not one of those Dominican cats everybody's
always going on about - he wasn't no home-run
hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy" with a
million hot girls on the line. No, Oscar is a fat,
self-loathing dweeb and aspiring science fiction
writer, who dreams of becoming "the Dominican
Tolkien." He's one of those kids who tremble with
fear during gym class and use "a lot of huge-
sounding nerd words like indefatigable and
ubiquitous" when talking to kids who could
barely finish high school. He moons after girls
who won't give him the time of day and enters
and leaves college a sad virgin. He wears "his
nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber"; he
"couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted
to."
Two of this novel's narrators, Oscar's
beautiful sister, Lola - a "Banshees-loving punk
chick," who becomes "one of those tough Jersey
dominicanas" who order men about like
houseboys - and Yunior, Oscar's college
roommate and Lola's onetime boyfriend, do their
best to try to get him to shape up. They exhort
him to eat less and exercise more, to leave his
dorm room and venture out into the world.
Oscar makes a halfhearted effort and then tells
Yunior to leave him alone. He goes back to his
writing, his day-dreams, his suicidal thoughts.
Yunior (who seems very much like the Yunior
who appeared in some of Mr. Diaz's short stories)
begins to think that Oscar may be living under a
family curse, "a high-level fuku" not unlike the
curse on the House of Atreus, which has doomed
him, like his mother, to lasting unhappiness in
love.
In due course we also hear the story of Oscar
and Lola's mother, Beli, a tough, tough-talking
woman whose hard-nosed street cred is rooted in
a childhood of almost unimaginable pain and
loss: her wealthy father, tortured and incarcerated
by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's thugs;
her mother, run over by a truck after her
husband's imprisonment; her two sisters, dead in
freak, suspicious accidents.
The orphaned Beli herself was abused and
beaten before being rescued by her father's kindly
cousin, and as a teenager she has a disastrous
affair with a charismatic and dangerous man
known as the Gangster - one of Trujillo's men,
who happens to be married to Trujillo's sister.
That affair culminates in a savage beating in the
cane fields, a beating that nearly ends Beli's life
and that will propel her toward a new life in exile
in the United States.
Mr. Diaz writes about the Trujillo era of the
Dominican Republic with the same authority he
writes about contemporary New Jersey, the
slangy, kinetic energy of his prose proving to be a
remarkably effective tool for capturing the
absurdities of the human condition, be they the
true horrors of living in a dictatorship that can
erase a person or a family on a whim, or the self-
indulgent difficulties of being a college student
coping with issues of weight and self-esteem.
Here is Mr. Diaz writing about Trujillo:
"Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was
his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock
the country away from the rest of the world,
isolate it behind the Platano Curtain, he acted like
it was his very own plantation, acted like he
owned everything and everyone, killed
whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers,
fathers, mothers, took women away from their
husbands on their wedding nights and then
would brag publicly about 'the great honeymoon'
he'd had the night before. His Eye was
everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-
Stasi'd the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone,
even those everyones who lived in the States."
It is Mr. Diaz's achievement in this galvanic
novel that he's fashioned both a big picture
window that opens out on the sorrows of
Dominican history, and a small, intimate window
that reveals one family's life and loves. In doing
so, he's written a book that decisively establishes
him as one of contemporary fiction's most
distinctive and irresistible new voices.
Author Biography
Junot Diaz was born in Santo Domingo,
Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown
and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize,
the National Book Critics Circle Award, the
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary
Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His
fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African
Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997,
1999, 2000), in Pushcart Prize XXII and in The
O'Henry Prize Stories 2009.
He has received a Eugene McDermott Award,
a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace
Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud
Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist
Fellowship from the National Endowment for the
Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study at Harvard University and the
Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston
Review and the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
From http://wwwjunotdiaz.com
HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA
By Laura G. Brown
I spent five weeks in China this summer,
touring Beijing and Shanghai and staying a month
in Xiaoshan, to teach English to 8th graders. It
was the first time I'd spent any length of time in a
Communist country, and my misgivings were such
that I kept a sharp eye on my passport - I found
a secret hiding place in my hotel room as I
traveled daily back and forth to school. I was
careful not to bring up Falun Gong or the plight of
Muslim Uighurs, even though Uighurs had rioted
in Urumqi on July 5, the day I arrived. Chinese
officials immediately blocked Facebook, Twitter,
and other internet sites; this lasted for the
duration of our visit. Luckily, a computer whiz in
our group had a program called Freegate, which
bypassed the Chinese controls and let us access
some of the sites.
Interestingly, just when I returned to the USA,
Chinese computer controls were again in the
news. According to Peter Foster of The Daily
Telegraph, China's information technology
minister said that the so-called "Green Dam
Youth Escort" software would now be
"voluntary", leaving users free to decide whether
or not to install it. Previously, China had said
that all of its computers must have the Green
Dam software, officially as a measure to protect
children and combat pornography on the web.
Internet users saw it as an attempt to tighten
internet restrictions.
We saw this censorship daily at our campus,
Xiaoshan Middle School, which boasts a
computer, and projector in each classroom, and
internet in the teacher's office (but not one flush
toilet or reliable soap dispenser). Need a YouTube
to illustrate a concept in English? Sorry. You can't
go there. Want to check an attachment on one of
your emails? You may not be able to open it. And
so on.
Maybe internet censorship explains why the
Chinese still revere Chairman Mao Zedong,
widely credited with causing the deaths of
40,000,000 people. You can find Mao's likeness
everywhere in Beijing. His picture hung from our
tour bus's rearview mirror. Our tour guide said
his mother has his picture on her wall, and she
regularly puts out cigarettes on a plate as homage
to him, because Mao liked to smoke. His larger-
than-life portrait still hangs prominently in
Tiananmen Square. He's on nearly every piece of
currency (called RMB, or yuan). The middle
school where I worked hangs his portrait in the
conference room, along with another state hero:
Josef Stalin. No Chinese person I spoke with had a
harsh word for Mao.
What kind of misinformation are they getting?
I wondered. I later found out that they don't
know much about the United States - students in
my class did not know the city of Los Angeles, or
even Hollywood, for that matter. They had never
heard about our 4th of July holiday. They had no
idea what a schoolteacher's salary might be - and
expressed amazement when told a teacher could
earn $50,000 per year.
On a more serious note, China shows no
inclination to slow down the pace of its
executions. When I mentioned this to my school
liaison, a very educated Chinese man, he said that
due to China's huge population of 1.3 billion
people, they had to "make an example" of people
who threatened social order. He also believed that
China's one child policy, advertised on billboards
everywhere, was necessary, and explained that
both he and his girlfriend were only children.
Because of this, they were allowed to have two
children, if they desired. He seemed to accept
unreservedly that the government should decide
the size of his family.
The last thing I did before leaving China was
to pick up a copy of the August 8-9 China Daily to
read on my Beijing-Los Angeles flight. The lead
story was Olympic Games chairman Jiang Xiayou
saying, on the anniversary of the Beijing
Olympics, that there was more press openness in
China now. I had seen differently with internet
sites being blocked at the onset of the Urumqi
riots.
Continuing with the China Daily, I noticed a
small "In Brief" item on page 2: "Airport Boss
Executed." It seems that a corrupt official
embezzled millions from the government. He was
convicted in February. February to August--I
commend China on its speedy resolution of
capital cases. Mr. Li, the airport embezzler, was
60. Were his organs usable? I say this because
there are reports by mainstream publications that
Falun Gong prisoners are being killed and their
organs harvested. "Organ selling is a huge
business for the Chinese. You can obtain organs in
China as you can nowhere else: any type, and
very speedily," reports Jay Nordlinger, senior
editor of the National Review.
China is careening toward capitalism. The
most striking phenomenon I observed during my
visit was the stark contrast between ancient and
modern. I especially noticed this in Beijing, where
I saw donkey carts and bicycles carrying huge
loads of scrap metal and cardboard weaving
through lanes of new cars (mostly American
models). People carried things to sell in yoke
baskets. Laundry hung out to dry over Guess and
Nike stores. Hammers and pickaxes do masonry
work; bamboo scaffolding supports emerging
high-rises. An army of cranes attempts to lift up
seemingly all of China.
Yet the country pollutes on a grand scale.
According to the New York Times, it has
surpassed the U.S. as the leading producer of
garbage, and its toxic incinerators threaten the air
quality of the Pacific Coast. I saw dull, brown
skies every day during my month I stayed in the
industrial city of Xiaoshan. Even after a daylong
rain, the sky is hazy and dull. When I'd heard last
year that athletes doubted they could compete in
Beijing because of the air quality, I was skeptical.
How could the air be that bad? I've changed my
mind after seeing and smelling it up close.
China represses human rights. It engages in
censorship, jailing of political opponents, and
frequent use of the death penalty. They are slowly
making changes in some of these areas
(particularly those that affect them economically)
but they're no Western democracy.
Yet, China is a beautiful country with friendly
people. I say I'd like sugar in my rice porridge. A
bowl of sugar appears every day from then on. I
want to swim in a local pool. My school translator
arranges a cab, takes me there, and works out all
the details, since I can't speak Chinese. I ran into
this kind of hospitality time and time again. It's
enough to make you want to return to China!
HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYERS IN CHINA
By Wen Chen and Daniel Wang
"Human rights lawyer" was a term that very
few people in China knew about back ten years
ago. Although people still remembered the 1989
Tiananmen Massacre, most Chinese people
already felt that it was hopeless to argue with the
government, and younger generations did not
even know the existence of the massacre since the
incident was not allowed to be mentioned
anywhere in public, except by the state-run
media, which defined it as a "political riot".
People just passively accepted all the
mistreatments and abuses they received, and
didn't even think about seeking for legal help.
When the crackdown on Falun Gong
happened in 1999, millions of Falun Gong
practitioners went to Beijing to appeal to the
central government for their rights. The
movement already surprised many Chinese
people --how dare you appeal to the government,
and what use is it? In the people's mind, when the
communist party decides to wipe out an
organization, it will for sure disappear within a
couple of days.
But Falun Gong did not disappear. Their
courageous efforts actually enlightened those
who want to defend their rights without resorting
to violence. Nowadays, Falun Gong practitioners
have turned their efforts underground. Instead of
appealing to the government and getting jailed
right away, they print flyers and pass them out to
every family, sometimes risking their lives to do
so.
However, nowadays there is an estimate of
more than 20 million Chinese people appealing to
the government for their rights, from farmers who
lost their land to city home owners who lost their
houses. People start to speak out and actively
seek for legal assistance. The internet has
definitely helped a lot in spreading out
information and awakening people's consciences.
It is encouraging to read stories of Chinese
human rights lawyers. They are not political
dissidents or human rights victims, but they dare
to speak out for those victims. The first human
rights lawyer I heard about was Mr. Gao
Zhisheng. He was one of the first lawyers who
did "non-guilty" defense for Falun Gong
practitioners, while the government forbids any
lawyer to do so. Mr. Gao is a Christian and one of
the "ten most outstanding Chinese lawyers". He
always allocates a third of his time to defend
human rights cases free of charge. Besides
defending the rights of Falun Gong practitioners,
he also wrote open letters to high level Chinese
government officials. His actions immediately
caught attention. Soon his license was revoked
and he was constantly monitored and then
arrested by the Chinese secret police since 2006.
His wife and two children escaped to the United
States in March 2009, but Mr. Gao is still detained
in China at this moment.
Gao Zhisheng's actions motivated many
Chinese attorneys. Now there are at least several
dozen well known Chinese attorneys actively
working on human rights cases. Recently, the LA
Times reported the story of a Chinese attorney,
Mr. Xu Zhiyong, who represents the parents of
children sickened or died last year as a result of
dangerous milk additives.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/
la-fg-china-lawyer7-2009aug07,0,954498.story
The change of a society starts with the change
of the individuals. The surge of Chinese human
rights lawyers reflects the change of Chinese
society. When more and more Chinese people
step forward to defend their rights and more
lawyers dare to help the victims, the dam of
communist repression becomes fragile and may
collapse soon.
(Falun Gong is a body and mind exercise
based on the principle of "Truth-Compassion-
Tolerance". Originated in China, and now
practiced by about 100 million people in over 100
countries, Falun Gong has been well known for its
health benefits and peaceful principles. However,
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started a
crackdown on Falun Gong in 1999 as it regarded
the group as threat to the power of CCP, who
always maintains control of the thinking of the
Chinese people, usually via media propaganda,
information blockages and direct control of all
organizations. By today, more than 3,000 death
cases in police custody have been confirmed and
more than one million Falun Gong practitioners
are detained.)
DEATH PENALTY ACTION
From Stevi Carroll
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/a
dvocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179
&template=x.ascx&action=13118
UPDATE: On September 18, a Federal district
court issued a 10-day restraining order which will
prevent Ohio from carrying out the execution as
scheduled on September 22. Romell Broom is still
at risk of execution in the near future.
URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
18 September 2009 UA 245/09 - Death penalty USA
Romell Broom (m)
Romell Broom, a 53-year-old African
American man, was taken to be executed on 15
September, but the team administering the lethal
injection failed to find a useable vein, and gave up
after two hours. The State of Ohio has now
rescheduled his execution for 22 September.
Romell Broom has been on death row for
nearly a quarter of a century. He was sentenced to
death in 1985 for the rape and murder of 14-year-
old Tryna Middleton in September 1984. After the
death sentence was upheld on appeal, Broom
sought to join a lawsuit challenging the
constitutionality of Ohio's lethal injection process.
However, the courts dismissed his attempt, ruling
that the challenge was time-barred and should
have been made earlier.
Romell Broom's execution was set for 15
September 2009 at 10am. The execution was
delayed for several hours as a final appeal to the
federal courts was awaited. Between 1 and 2pm,
after the courts had lifted the stay of execution,
the lethal injection team began preparations for
the execution. After an hour of the team trying to
find a suitable vein in his arms, Romell Broom
tried to help them. According to Associated Press,
"When his help made no difference, he turned
onto his back and covered his face with both
hands. His torso heaved up and down and his
feet shook. He wiped his eyes and was handed a
roll of toilet paper, which he used to wipe his
brow."
Romell Broom's lawyer was in the attorney
waiting room. When she questioned the delay she
was taken to a room where she could watch the
procedure on closed-circuit television. She has
said that "it was perfectly apparent that the
execution was going very wrong", and that
Romell Broom was "wincing in pain" as the
execution team held him down and tried to find a
vein. At one point, she said, "they really hurt
him", and he "grimaced in pain". She contacted
her co-counsel to tell him what was happening Ð
that the execution team had been trying for two
hours to find a vein and had apparently now
taken a "break." The co-counsel sent a letter by fax
and email to the state Governor and the Chief
Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, urging that
the execution be stopped. His letter to the court
pointed out that in the ongoing legal challenge to
Ohio's lethal injection protocol, the state's position
had been that "the medical members of the
execution team are skilled at obtaining IV access."
Governor Strickland, who had earlier denied
Bloom clemency, issued a one-week reprieve. The
warrant reads, "Difficulties in administering the
execution protocol necessitate a temporary
reprieve to allow the Department [of corrections]
to recommend appropriate next steps to me... The
Department should carry out Mr Broom's
sentence [on 22 September] unless further
reprieve or clemency is granted." On 17
September, in relation to the Ohio lethal injection
lawsuit, a federal judge ordered that by 21
September a statement be taken from Romell
Broom about the execution attempt, and that the
state disclose relevant documents by 28
September.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
On 3 May 1946, Willie Francis, an African
American prisoner convicted of a murder committed
when he was 17 years old, was taken to Louisiana's
death chamber and placed in the electric chair, but due
to some malfunction in the equipment, he survived
and was returned to his cell. In January 1947, the US
Supreme Court concluded that the prisoner's
constitutional rights had not been violated, dismissing
the argument that because he had undergone the
mental strain of preparing for execution, to require him
to undergo it again would be to subject him to a
lingering and cruel punishment. The Court continued,
"Even the fact that petitioner has already been
subjected to a current of electricity does not make his
subsequent execution any more cruel in the
constitutional sense than any other execution. The
cruelty against which the Constitution protects a
convicted man is cruelty inherent in the method of
punishment, not the necessary suffering involved in
any method employed to extinguish life humanely.
The fact that an unforeseeable accident prevented the
prompt consummation of the sentence cannot, it seems
to us, add an element of cruelty to a subsequent
execution." Willie Francis was returned to the electric
chair on 9 May 1947 and killed.
In the six decades since that chilling episode, the
world has turned inexorably against the death penalty,
recognizing its inherent flaws. Today, 139 countries are
abolitionist in law or practice. The USA, in contrast,
has carried out 1,174 executions since resuming
judicial killing in 1977, with 1,003 carried out by lethal
injection, the method currently promoted by advocates
of the death penalty as "humane." In April 2007 the US
Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of
Kentucky's execution protocol. A majority of the USA's
death penalty states, and the federal government, use
the same three-drug combination as Kentucky to
anaesthetize, paralyze and kill the condemned
prisoner. In its Baze v. Rees ruling, the Court recalled
its 1947 decision in the Francis case, noting that
"simply because an execution method may result in
pain, either by accident or as an inescapable
consequence of death, does not establish the sort of
objectively intolerable risk of harm that qualifies as
cruel and unusual."
There have been regular "botched" lethal injections
in the USA. In Ohio in May 2006, for example, it took
the execution team 22 minutes to find a useable vein in
Joseph Clark's arm for insertion of the catheter. A few
minutes later, however, the vein collapsed, and Clark's
arm began to swell. The team then tried for another 30
minutes to find another vein, while witnesses heard
"moaning, crying out and guttural noises" coming from
behind the curtain. Death was pronounced about 90
minutes after the execution began. The following year,
also in Ohio, the execution team struggled to find
useable veins in Christopher Newton's arms, and the
prisoner was not declared dead until almost two hours
after the execution process began.
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty
in all cases, unconditionally, regardless of the method
chosen to kill the condemned prisoner. The death
penalty is inherently cruel and degrading,
incompatible with human dignity. To end the death
penalty is to abandon a destructive, diversionary and
divisive public policy that is not consistent with widely
held values. It not only runs the risk of irrevocable
error, it is also costly, to the public purse as well as in
social and psychological terms. It has not been proved
to have a special deterrent effect. It tends to be applied
in a discriminatory way, on grounds of race and class.
It denies the possibility of reconciliation and
rehabilitation. It prolongs the suffering of the murder
victim's family, and extends that suffering to the loved
ones of the condemned prisoner. It diverts resources
that could be better used to work against violent crime
and assist those affected by it.
There have been 38 executions in the USA this
year, four of them in Ohio.
RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send
appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:
- Pointing out the inherent cruelty of the death
penalty, starkly illustrated in this case, with a
man under sentence of death for nearly 25 years
put through a failed execution attempt and now
having to prepare for another execution date;
- Calling on the Governor to stop this
execution and to reconsider his decision to deny
Romell Bloom clemency;
- Explaining that you are not seeking to excuse
violent crime or to downplay the suffering caused
to its victims.
APPEALS TO:
Governor Ted Strickland, Governor's Office,
Riffe Center, 30th Floor, 77 South High Street
Columbus, OH 43215-6108
Fax: 1 614 466 9354
Email:
http://www.governor.ohio.gov/Assistance/Con
tacttheGovernor/tabid/150/Default.aspx
Salutation: Dear Governor
PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY.
Check with the AIUSA Urgent Action office if
sending appeals after 22 September 2009.
MONTHLY LETTER COUNT
UAs 20
Total 20
To add your letters to the total contact
lwkamp@gmail.com.
Amnesty International Group 22
The Caltech Y
Mail Code 5-62
Pasadena, CA 91125
www.its.caltech.edu/~aigp22/
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com