Students for Prison Education and Reform launched the newest protest campaign,“Who Do We Kill,” onMonday.
The campaign is to protest the death penalty in the United States.
The campaign began with a talk by Anthony Ray Hinton, an exoneree who was on death row for 30 years.
“I have been through pure hell,” Hinton said, regarding his experience as a death row inmate.
He noted that no one, regardless of race or gender, should ever be on death row for a crime they never committed, and urged for the end of death sentence.
“We need to put an end to the death row,” he added.
Steffen Seitz ’17, co-organizer of the campaign, said that Hinton’s experience is something that few people hear about and it’s important for people to understand the torture of living under death row.
SPEAR co-president Clarissa Kimmey ’16 said that the first piece of the protest would be this Wednesday, when Texas inmate Raphael Holiday is scheduled to be executed.
Kimmey explained that all the students participating in the protests will wear black ribbons around their wrists.
SPEAR advocacyco-chair Margaret Wright ’17 said that students can get ribbons in the Pace Center for Civic Engagement.
Maxwell Grear ’18, co-organizer of the campaign, said that the goal of the campaign is to start conversation about the death penalty on campus and remind people about its continuing prevalence.
He explained that every time a person is scheduled to be executed in the country, SPEAR will circulate information about each person and hold a protest. He said that the protests are meant to last indefinitely until the death penalty is outlawed in the United States.
Grear explained that although it seems that people are overall sympathetic to the idea of reforming the criminal justice system, they are more accepting of the status quo in terms of the death penalty.
The issue is not on the radar of most people or there is a certain sense of complacency, he added.
Wright said that what is visible in the media is only the stories of the victims in terms of the crimes that were allegedly committed.
“It’s really easy not to think about the fact that each one of these people is a human being with an entire life story,” she added.
Kimmey said that another one of SPEAR’s goals is to let the people being executed speak for themselves. The campaign will distribute letters written by people on death row to students on campus.
“When you talk about drone warfare or police killings or gun violence, there are staggering numbers of people affected that brace people,” SPEAR co-president Daniel Teehan ’17 said.“With the death penalty, however, if you say the number of people that are executed, that doesn’t really register with people, and yet it’s really something that exceptional in society that we’re still allowing the killing of people.”
He added that although the number of executed people are not very large, the system is still something to be protested against.
“Even though it’s not 30,000 people every year, even if it’s just 50 people, it’s 50 people too many. I think that’s the message we’re trying to convey with the campaign,” he added.
Kyle Berlin ’18, a participant in the campaign, said, that he thinks the campaign is important because the death penalty is “an act of extreme injustice.”
“The fact that we can call ourselves civilized and then kill people, many of whom are African Americans or later proven to be innocent, is a travesty,” he said.
He said he hopes SPEAR’s protests will spur some conversations on campus so students can start talking about the death penalty and how it represents a larger system of injustice and discrimination.
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