JERRY BROWN SPEAKS OUT
THAT'S THE WAY I SEE IT 
On February 23, 1996, here in
the San Fran-cisco Bay Area, William Bonin was sent to his death, murdered
by the state, by our representatives, in our name, to protect us. At one
time, clemency was actually an option, but today there is no clemency, even
though the governor has that power. There isn't the same mood of generosity
or humanity to look at what we are really doing. It's quite a bit different
from what I remember 30 years ago. Politics was manipulative then too; there
were flaws; there was corruption. But it was a time of building, a time
of possibilities, a time of optimism that things could be done, that universities
could be opened, that students could go there for a few hundred dollars
a year, and somehow it all worked much better than it works today.
The execution of William Bonin was not the traditional gas chamber of the
past. That has been ruled cruel and unusual. Instead, we have something
that seems very kind and benign and technical; the injection of chemicals,
Nazi-style, as in medical experimentation, with doctors standing by, in
violation of their oath, to make sure that the process is handled properly,
that trained personnel inject the fluids correctly, and that the individual
is strapped as in the movie Dead Man Walking . Then they pull the
curtain, and when they open it up, there he is half-dead by that time with
the fatal chemicals injected into the bloodstream.
The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept
state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever
be entrusted with that kind of power. The sacredness of what we ourselves
do not create requires us to stand back before that ultimate act. Moreover,
I believe the death penalty is used as a substitute for addressing the fact
that so many little children are being programmed by a social order that
profits the few, that validates the current political dialogue/discussion/electoral
game, all the while ensur ing the highest murder rate, the highest incarceration
rate, of any country in the world. If that is re cognized, people will begin
to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Let's do something real and not just execute
these indi viduals." Some criminals deserve far greater torment than
a hypodermic needle or even a gas chamber, but that torment should not be
at the hands of another human being. Let's draw the boundary earlynot wait
until it's obvious like Hitler's Germanyand insist that the state shall
never, never, take the life of a person!
Last year, the Supreme Court Justices voted to uphold mandatory urine tests
of all teenagers who wish to participate in public school athletics. Teenagers
don't own their own body; they have to make it available for scientific
validation. I don't think these tests are about drugs. They are about docility;
they are about building up a proto-fascist state on one side and on the
other, in the same continuum (but more horrible)execution with the hypodermic
needle. Lethal injection looks good; it sounds modern; it's sanitary; it's
clean; it bloodless; it's painless; it's behind the curtain. But it's another
form of the Aztec human sacrifice done in a way that is hard to perceive
because it's wrapped into the technological aura and context and jargon
that we believe in now. In the absence of more traditional religion, this
is worship of state power, of state technology in killing people convicted
of murder. We don't own ourselves!
Execution doesn't get rid of the structure of incentives that makes hideous
crime possible. I'm not saying there's a cause like some kind of genetic
factor. I'm saying that when you create a context of racial separation with
people of one color in a very oppressed situation, you're going to increase
the likelihood of crime and murder and hatred. I don't say that full equality
eliminates all crime or even all murder. I do say that, given the social
order based on discrimination, on racial difference, on privilege for the
few and anxiety for the many and great oppression for tens of millionsit
is inevitable that we get the kind of murder rate we have. Even if they
run that gas chamber or use that hypodermic needle hundreds of times a month,
it will not stop this situation because the context is embedded in the consciousness
of people as they are born and grow up in that system.
Without excusing things, we know the murder rate is high in the United States,
and we know that it occurs mostly among poor people, where the economic
struggle is so intense that human emotions, as they spill out in rage, result
in murder, brutality of the worst kind. The response is more and more executions.
Of the twenty-five to thirty thousand people murdered every year, there
will be 40 or 50, maybe 100, maybe 200 people executed, only a fraction
of a percent compared to the number of people who commit murders. Nothing
is being done about the breeding grounds of crime, which is not just the
poverty but the disrespect, the isolation, the insults that little children
experience growing up in neighborhoods where there is no dignified income,
employ ment, craft-skill, membership in a viable community. Instead we have
the anarchy, the struggle, the crucifixion of American cities where so much
of this crime comes from. Is there any relief? None!
Go visit parts of Philadelphia or Oakland or Los Angeles or Washington,
DC and walk through the neigh borhoods where little children are being prepared
for prison, for drive-by shootings, and for all manner of devastation. Who's
preparing it? The people in power! I'm talking about people in both parties
who preside over a system that offers no hope and the absolute certainty
that tens of thousands of people will turn out to be murderers within the
first 30 years of their lives. Those people will not be selected randomly
but out of
the ranks of the poor and the neighborhoods that are abandoned, sacrificed
on the altar of something called free enterprise or free trade or the market
or progress or technological change or GATT or the New World Order something
totally diversionary from the truth. The truth is the injustice that is
absolutely obvious by just getting out of your car and opening your eyes
to the neglect and the abandonment of millions and millions of people, people
who have had no choice. They're dropped out of the womb into the suffering,
t he prejudice, and the de facto bigotry without knowing what's in store
for them. If they're born in Beverly Hills, it's okay. If they're born in
the middle of Watts or a few blocks from the White House, they're in deep
trouble. And that is not being addressed at all. That has to change, or
the death penalty will run on and expand; the frustration will grow; and
I foresee much greater oppression and violence by the state in the futile
effort to put back a social order that doesn't work for many people
William Bonin is accused of horrible crimestorturing, killing, strangling,
mutilating more than a dozen young boys. So if it is a matter of an eye-for-an-eye,
he got off quite easily. That misses the point, though. The point is that
the state bureaucracy has no moral culpability, no more than a B-52 bomber
killing innocent villag ers in Vietnam. An execution is on a smaller scale,
yes, but carried out with all the hoopla of the eleven o'clock news, Ron
Owens from KGO giving a report from inside, and other reporters standing
outside. It's the way it was in England when people packed their picnic
lunches and took their children to watch a hanging. That level of barbarism
and primitive thinking has not left us. It was very much in evidence in
the media treating Bonin's execution as another circus, another opportunity
to fill time between commercials, all done in a sanitized, asep tic way.
There's nothing dirty or messy here, no neck to be broken on the noose,
no pellets dropping into the acid bath to create the gas that kills. The
condemned doesn't do much squirming. Even so, they pull the curtain in front
of the 50 assembled peoplethe press, friends of the victims, and friends
of the murderer. It reminds me of "The Lottery," the short story
by Shirley Jackson, where one person in the village is picked to be stoned
each year, a ritual that kept that town safe from whatever demons they feared.
The demons we fear now are even more intrusive, reported every night in
gang and murder statistics that come over the news. The killing by the state
of this poor, demented individualor however you want to de scribe himis
supposed to have some impact. Is it revenge? Is it deterrence? Is it bloodlust?
Or is it just another metaphor to fool the people into thinking that something
important is happening. Why all the coverage? There's no coverage for the
creation of the environment that makes murder more likely. William Bonin
was sodomized and abandoned as a child. He went to Vietnam where he was
trained to kill people. He learned how to control peoplehe even said that.
That's part of the fallout of the Vietnam War (and probably of any war).
Executions occur, first of all, to make the politicians look good. They
don't have to raise taxes to do it, and they're killing people that nobody
likes. They can claim that their predecessors didn't kill enough people
and that the judges are weak-kneed. In California, for example, since January
1983, there has been a series of very right-wing governors. They've appointed
all but one of the members of the Supreme Court, 95% of the judges, and
signed hundreds of laws; yet there have only been three executions since
the early '70s. What it really is about is politics at the cheapest leveland
validation of the state. If the state can execute, if it can kill, then
the state has tremendous power. San Quentin has an aura of the Grand Inquisitor
or the faceless murderer murder ing the murderer. It is all about accumulating
that coercive power of the state to cow the people so they will continue
to believe that they are powerless, that there is a force greater than themselves"The
State"never really understanding that the state is just a creation,
an agreement of individuals doing stuff in our name. And when that stuff
is inhuman, when it's cruel, when it's unsustainable, when it's wronghey,
stop it!
Some argue against the death penalty because innocent people are sometimes
executed. I don't believe there is widespread support for innocent life
when the propaganda veil is pulled over the question. For ex ample, when
Bush went down to Panama to pick up Noriega, at least 500 people were killed,
probably more. Those people were killed, murdered. There was no need on
this planet for Americaor anybodyto go down there and kill those people
to pick up Noriega. That was a political show. There was no outrage, very
little public condemnation in the Congress. Violence is not really condemned
by the powers-that-be when it suits their purposes. We saw that in Vietnam;
we see it all over the world. Violence is embraced as the M.O. of choice
by Nixon, by Kissinger, and by many other leaders of the state.
When Reagan sent two planes to bomb Khadaffi's house and his children, what
was the difference between murdering Khadaffi's young children there and
murdering young kids here? Do you think when the shrapnel was tearing their
little bodies apart, that they felt okay because Reagan was sending a message
to their daddy,who was accusedfalsely, as it turned outof bombing a bar
in Germany? That we had a president who murdered innocent people for no
justifiable reason is almost unspeakable. I don't think you could say that
outside of Pacifica Radio. And yet I can't find an argument against that
proposition.
Back in June of 1993, when there was an alleged threatened attack on Bush
coming out of Iraq, President Clinton ordered Tomahawk missiles to be rained
down on Baghdad and eight people were killed. The whole
discussion in the next few days was that Clinton was really sending a messagegetting
tough (you can't show weakness in front of a dictator). That was awfully
close to being a drive-by shooting, but the language was not there. There
is no language to talk about shooting when it comes from the state. It gets
insulated and wrapped in a different package.
Even in reviewing the Vietnam war, they still talk about 56,000 people killed.
Actually it was a couple of million and they're all human beings. So the
death penalty is part of a larger fabric of insensitivity and accep tance
of the almighty state. It's almost a godlike force that people, against
their better judgment, are embracing. And that is the real danger. Capital
punishment in today's kind of world won't stop with the people being executed.
Unless it is exposed and refuted for what it really is, this kind of death
mentality will spread, and we'll all be the losers.
The execution of William Bonin is a significant event. It's not popular
to speak out against it because a lot of people who end up on death rowgiven
their recordare not attractive human beings. But their crimes shouldn't
obscure the fact that executions don't deal with the conditions that create
a high murder rate. A huge amount of crime is going on, and there is virtually
no conversation about what might change it. It will have to be a very different
kind of society and arrangement of power and opportunity. I don't tie the
death rate to economics one -to-one, but it's pretty obvious that as you
raise the level of hatred and isolation and prejudice, you squeeze and pressure
people. Out of tens of millions of people, you're going to get twenty or
thirty thousand a year who engage in these kinds of unspeakable acts.
Machiavelli said that it is easier to get people to fear than to love. If
you want to mobilize people, manipulate their fear. As long as that continues
to be the case, as long as the growth in population is matched by a growth
in technology and weapons of force and other machines and systems that can
wreak havoc, watch out, watch out! The death penalty cannot be isolated
from a whole framework of thinking, a whole consciousness. If that consciousness
isn't changed, there is absolutely no hope for the continued survival over
the long term of the human species.
