Death Loses/Massachusetts Wins Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit ------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the November 20, 1997 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- STRUGGLE AGAINST THE TIDE: DEATH PENALTY REJECTED IN MASSACHUSETTS By Steve Gillis Executive Board, Steelworkers Local 8751 Boston The grassroots movement to stop the death penalty in Massachusetts is celebrating. It won a hard-fought victory on Nov. 6. Just a week earlier, both the Senate and the House had narrowly voted to reinstate the death penalty. But the public reaction was so strong that one state legislator then changed his vote, preventing passage of the legislation. "The politicians on Beacon Hill were forced to hear loud and clear from unionists, prisoner rights advocates, churches, youth, and tens of thousands of justice-loving people that we will never tolerate their death-penalty program of fear, terror and diversion," Imani Henry of the National People's Campaign told Workers World. The NPC, along with the American Friends Service Committee, United American Indians of New England, Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty, and activists from across the labor and community spectrum in Massachusetts, sprang into action at the end of October when Acting Governor Cellucci and other politicians suddenly declared that instituting capital punishment was their top priority. STRUGGLE AMID CUTBACKS The struggle against the death penalty took place against a backdrop of social service cutbacks and a media frenzy pushing for capital punishment. Since July 1997, the state government has cut off nearly 50,000 families from welfare, while forcing 30,000 women into nonpaying workfare jobs. Headlines warn daily of increasing infant mortality, growing numbers of families without health benefits, rising homelessness among poor families and youth, and severe shortages in childcare services. Black and Latino communities have been the hardest hit. In early October, execution zealots targeted Massachusetts, seizing on the tragic murder of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley of Cambridge, allegedly by two gay men, one of them Black. Public officials and the press howled for their lynching, using homophobic slurs equating gay love with child exploitation and murder. In the face of these blitzkrieg tactics, the Democrats who dominate the state legislature and who had been trying to postpone a vote on the death penalty, backed down. On Oct. 28, despite a large demonstration organized by the NPC the previous day, the Senate and the House passed different versions of a death-penalty bill. The governor announced the signing ceremony. The Kennedys, Kerrys, and the entire liberal establishment were silent. `NOW IS THE TIME TO SEIZE ON OUR MOMENTUM' Undaunted, anti-death-penalty activists continued to organize, mobilizing several emergency demonstrations, petition drives, and phone and fax barrages that Boston's State House could not escape. Ed Childs, chief shop steward of Hotel and Restaurant workers Local 26, addressed a rally Nov. 5 of forces determined to derail the death train. Speaking over a handful of white hecklers, Childs recalled the Guilford 4 and other Irish anti-colonialists framed up by England. "If England had the death penalty, many Irish political prisoners would not be alive today. And if Massachusetts had had the death penalty, how many innocent Black men would be dead today?" charged Childs. Paul Hill, an Irish Guilford 4 defendant, Sister Helen Prejean of "Dead Man Walking" fame, and other international figures joined the struggle against the death penalty. The politicians huddled in back rooms and whispered in the aisles. The gov ernor stormed out of his office screaming obscenities. The workers and oppressed were mad as hell and organized. At the 11th hour, the heat of this movement's intervention forced the reversal of what had been trumpeted as an accomplished fact. As suddenly as they had voted for death, the Democrats maneuvered one of their legislators to switch votes rather than face the wrath of their anti-death-penalty constituents. Kazi Tour,, a former U.S. political prisoner, told Workers World, "Now is the time to seize on the momentum our new coalition has built, to end the death penalty nationwide, to free Mumia Abu Jamal and all political prisoners, and to take on the state and all its repressive forces." - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to: info@workers.org. Web: http://workers.org) ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytrc-11.15.97-03:02:53-11521