Elayne Clift (elayne-clift.com) has written this column about women, politics, and social issues from the earliest days of this newspaper.
BRATTLEBORO-In February this year, Texas executed a man named Ivan Cantu for murder despite the fact that evidence discovered post-trial had raised serious questions about his guilt, persuading jurors from his first trial to ask the courts to reconsider his case.
A campaign supported by thousands of Texans pushed to pause the execution, and faith leaders called for a closer look at the case because of recanted testimony from a key witness and claims that another witness lied on the stand.
There were copious reasons to doubt Cantu was the perpetrator of the crime, but he was denied a delay. Just before he was executed, he stated again that he was innocent.
In April, Oklahoma executed Michael Smith, who claimed to the end that he was innocent. And in April, Missouri executed Brian Dorsey, despite pleas from 70 prison guards and a retired warden.
Between the time of this writing and the end of the year, seven more executions are scheduled, two in Ohio and in five other states. Between 2025 and 2027, Ohio alone has 12 executions scheduled.
Marcellus Williams is facing execution in Missouri, despite DNA evidence supporting his innocence.
Another man, Toforest Johnson, has spent over 25 years on Alabama's death row. Now the prosecutor is calling for a new trial because Johnson's conviction relied on the words of a witness who was paid for her testimony. Alabama continues to seek his execution.
These prison executions beg the question: What civilized, developed nation justifies executing anyone in the name of the state (irrespective of whether they committed a heinous crime)?
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Once in decline, executions in the U.S. have begun increasing in the last few decades. Hard-line prosecutors, tough-on-crime governors, and the Supreme Court have played a role in the increase, according to a January Politico post on Instagram, which stated that SCOTUS is "more likely to push an execution forward than to intervene to stop it," including in cases where doubt exists, or the means of execution could result in severe suffering.
Numerous states appear to be "jumping on board," the Politico post said: Alabama, South Carolina, Utah, and Florida are among the states restarting or scheduling executions.
In Utah executions can take place by firing squad, and in Alabama nitrogen gas is used. In Florida, where last year six death warrants were signed by the governor, a unanimous verdict by the jury no longer is required for death sentences.
According to the Sentencing Project, the U.S. is the world leader in incarceration. There are two million people in the nation's prisons and jails - a 500% increase over the last four decades.
"Changes in sentencing law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase," the organization says. "These trends have resulted in prison overcrowding and fiscal burdens on states to accommodate a rapidly expanding penal system, despite increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not an effective means of achieving public safety."
Further, according to the National Institute of Justice, citing analysis by the Pew Center some years ago, "more than one in every 100 adults at the time [2008] was behind bars, "with incarceration heavily concentrated among men, racial and ethnic minorities, and 20-and 30-year olds.
"Among men the highest rate is with black males aged 20–34. Among women it's with black females aged 35–39."
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Thankfully, the Innocence Project has helped free and/or exonerate hundreds of wrongfully convicted people since 1992. Many were convicted because of eyewitness misidentification, misapplication of forensic science, false confessions, coerced pleas, and official misconduct.
Part of the problem with mass incarceration relates to the "prison-industrial complex," a term that Tufts University defines as "the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems."
Tufts' Prison Divestment project indicates that more than two million people incarcerated in U.S. jails are subject to being part of the partnership between parties with vested interests in mass incarceration.
Prison labor comes cheap. It is based on exploitation that serves corporations, governments, and correctional facilities. I personally know a wrongfully committed woman who was paid 12 cents an hour for her work in the prison before her sentence was commuted.
And a recent report on Democracy Now revealed that an Associated Press investigation traced a "hidden prison labor web" where former Southern slave plantations are being used as "work release" sites for incarcerated people.
The people working at the plantations are disproportionately Black. Their labor makes it possible for agricultural products to keep flowing to major supermarket chains, where prices keep increasing while workers remain paid in pennies and are badly treated.
That forced labor is legal, it seems, because of the 13th Amendment exception on enslavement as punishment for a crime.
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But enough about facts and data that expose a dreadful situation. It's time to put a human face on the idea of slave labor and to humanize people languishing in prison and on death row.
Imagine waiting to be tied to a table and killed. Consider that incarcerated women and girls are routinely abused and raped, and many languish in jail for decades, perhaps without hope of parole, because they finally had the courage to resist the violence perpetrated against them at home and revisited in prison.
It's clear that a civilized nation must do better, starting here, starting now.
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