Good morning, Mr. Minister, dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, it is a real pleasure
and an honor to be among you.
It is particularly a pleasure to be in this historical room, in this beautiful room with
this beautiful painting.
I am proud.
It is wonderful to see and encouraging to see so many participants gather here from all
corners of the world to demonstrate their commitment to the abolition of the death penalty.
I am proud to be representing the Council of Europe.
On December 2003, I was appointed Council of Europe, Goodwill Ambassador for the abolition
of the death penalty.
The Council has played a leading role as a guardian for our fundamental rights and freedoms
in the battle towards abolition, believing that the death penalty has no place in democratic
societies.
In early 1980, the Council of Europe became a pioneer for the abolition of capital punishment,
considering it a great violation of human right.
The organization's parliamentary assembly gradually persuaded government to help Europe
become the first region in the world to permanently outlaw the death penalty.
In 1982, the Council of Europe adopted protocol number six to the European Convention on Human
Rights, which became the first legally binding instrument abolishing the death penalty in
peacetime.
Europe is today the only region in the world where the death penalty is no longer applied.
In 1989, abolition of the death penalty was made a prerequisite of a session for all new
member states.
As then, all countries are committed to introducing an immediate moratorium on execution and ratifying
protocol number six when joining the organization.
As a result, no execution has taken place on the territory of the organization's member
states since 1997.
Today, the protocol has been ratified by 46 of the Council's 47 states.
The one exception is Russia, which has committed itself to ratification, and which we hope
will finally say that they abolish the death penalty.
The idea now is to spread these values to the rest of the world, is starting with two
countries that enjoy observer status to the organization, the United States and Japan.
I will also urge Belarus, the one European country that does retain capital punishment,
and all countries throughout the world to follow the European model, outlaw the death
penalty, and make abolition a universally accepted value.
I believe that abolishing capital punishment is a high point among the Council of Europe's
achievement.
I am very proud to represent an organization that has worked so hard at freeing its territory
from state-sanctioned killings.
There should be no place for the death penalty in democratic societies.
I am shocked and appalled at the unabated pursuit of the application of the death penalty
in the U.S., China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Japan, among others.
The death penalty is a violation of our most fundamental rights, the right to life, a premeditated
and cold-blooded killing of a human being by the state, a cruel, inhumane, and degrading
punishment done in the name of justice.
The death penalty is selectively applied.
It feeds prejudice against those who are a minority, poor and lacking political clout.
The application of the death penalty is unfair, arbitrary, and capricious, often based on
jurisprudence, fraught with racial discrimination and judicial bias.
For nearly three decades, I have campaigned for justice and human rights throughout the
world.
In the last few years, I have established the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation.
During that period, I have witnessed the state machinery of death at work, selectively killing
people because they are poor, a minority lacking political clout and cannot afford an adequate
legal counsel.
The death penalty is unfair and arbitrary and often based on jurisprudence that should
not call itself that name.
Clemency should be the historic remedy for preventing miscarriages of justice, where judicial
process has been exhausted, regrettably in many countries, and in particularly one that
I know the system in the U.S. that is a lack of meaningful appellate review in commutation
proceedings.
Defendants have poor access to executive clemency, and too often the states fail to recognize
the defendant's capacity for change, rehabilitation, and remorse.
Those who are executed are rarely those who have committed the worst crime.
It is for that that I believe that the death penalty is a Russian roulette.
It is impossible, as you all know, to ensure that innocents are not executed.
Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, over 130 people have been released
from death row for wrongful conviction in the U.S.
They were the fortunate ones that got away before it was too late.
But no one knows how many innocents were executed until today.
During his first presidential campaign, President George Bush said, I am convinced, I am confident
that every person that has been put to death in Texas on my watch has been guilty of the
crime charge and had had full access to the court.
Well, I am here a witness who witnessed the execution of someone that I, and many throughout
the world, believed to be innocent, Gary Grant, who wanted to be known as Shaka Sankofa.
One of the most serious arguments against the death penalty is that human beings and
all legal systems are infallible.
Miscarriages of justice occur for more often than most people realize.
When the state executes an innocent person, it is sanctioned murder.
This state sanctioned murders have no place in the 21st century society, only when it
gets its own house in order.
Can America claim to stand for freedom and justice?
I am now supporting the case for clemency for Reggie Clemens.
He has been on Missouri's death row for over 16 years.
He was sentenced to death convicted of being an accomplice in the death of two white women
in 1991.
Humans and two other African-American men were sentenced to death while a fourth person,
a young white man, was offered a plea deal and is out on parole.
The case is like many capital cases, fraught with racial bias.
The original suspect, a white man and the cousin of the woman, confessed to the crime
after failing a lie detector test and changing his history several times.
All three black defenders claim that the confessions were coerced by police beatings or denial
of constitutional rights.
Reggie and other presence on the night of the crime were brutalized by the police.
The male cousin of the two victims initially confessed to the murders by, ultimately, filed
suit against the city of St. Louis for police brutality and received a 150,000 settlement.
The arraignment judge sent Clemens to the hospital for obvious injuries he did not have before
his interview with police.
Yet Reggie could not use his own experience of beating at the hands of St. Louis police
as a mitigating factor in his trial.
The prosecutor behaved so egregiously that he has held incriminal control and confined
for his conduct.
As often happens in capital cases, Reggie's defence team was woefully incompetent and inadequate.
The husband and wife team were in the middle of a divorce and conducted themselves unprofessionally.
They did not do a pre-trial investigation and had Reggie's mother, who has no legal
background, draft questions for the wish-nits.
One of the lawyers then moved to California, virtually abandoning the case.
Her husband was no better prepared and has since developed a long disciplinary record.
African-Americans were improperly excluded from the jury.
Only two of the 12 juries were African-Americans, even though, as the judge considered on the
record in his experience, St. Louis juries were usually half white, half black.
There is no physical evidence linking Clemens to the offence.
Lawyers were improperly excluded from the original trial and the prosecutor was guilty
of serious misconduct.
It came to light only recently that critical evidence was never provided to the defence
or tester for DNAs.
As you can see, this is just one case.
There could be thousands and thousands of cases that I could be speaking to you here
to raise why we should abolish the death penalty.
Since the reinstatement of the death penalty, 1,190 side people have been executed in the
U.S.
52 were executed last year, a rise from 37 in 2008, 35 states still have the death penalty.
New Mexico recently called a halt to execution for financial reasons.
All 35 of these states use lethal injection as their primary method of execution.
Proponents of capital punishment would like us to believe that some means such as lethal
injections are humane and therefore less barbaric.
Of the more than 500 lethal injections administered in the U.S. since 1992, roughly 42 cases have
gone conspicuously wrong.
The Hippocratic oath bars doctors from administering lethal injection and the task falls to prison
employees resulting in instances of incorrect dosage that have allowed inmates to awaken
during their execution.
I would like to read you about some particular cases that are so shocking that I cannot believe
that they have taken place in a democracy.
On September 15, 2009, the state of Ohio attempted to execute Rommel Broome by lethal injection.
Efforts to find a suitable vein and to execute Mr. Broome were terminated after more than
two hours when the executioners were unable to find a usable vein in his arms or legs.
During the failed efforts, Mr. Broome wins and grimace with pain.
After the fair hours lack of success on several occasions, Broome tried to help the executioners
find a good vein.
At one point, he covered his face with both hands and appeared to be sobbing.
His stomach was heaving.
Finally, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland ordered the execution to stop and announced plans
to attempt the execution anew after one week delay so that physicians could be consulted
for advice on how the men could be killed more efficiently.
When the state of Florida executed Benny Dems by lethal injection on June 8, 2008, the execution
official had a problem finding a vein.
He complained about the procedure and said that he bleed profusely, said George Schaeffer,
attorney for Benny Dems.
But witnesses saw it was Dems' strap to the gurney and screaming.
It took execution technicians 33 minutes to find suitable veins for the execution.
They butcher me back there, said Dems, in his final statement.
I was in lots of pain.
They cut me in the groin.
They cut me in the leg.
I was bleeding profusely.
This is not an execution.
It is a murder.
Indeed, it is a murder.
The A's amendment to the U.S. Constitution prescribed the state from inflicting torture
or a lingering death and from cruel and unusual punishment.
The United States proclaimed itself a beacon of democracy and civil liberty.
I urge the United States states to abolish the death penalty.
When, to my consternation, on April 16, 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that little injection
is properly administered, if properly administered is a humane means of executing a condemned
prisoner.
I was stunned and very sad.
I would like to say that the reason why I feel so strong about the death penalty, as
some of you know, is because I have witnessed the execution of an innocent man, Gary Graham,
who wanted to be known as Chakasankofa.
I would like to mention, just before leaving you, the case of Uganda, where they want to
introduce an anti-homosexuality bill, which has now been debated.
It proposes death sentence for certain cases of gay sex, namely, if the accused is HIV
posity, a serial offender, a person of authority over the other partner, or if the victim is
under 18 at a time when gay rights have been asserted all over the world.
This is a retrograde step that sets alarms bell ringing.
I have outlined many of the practical reasons for abolishing the death penalty, reasons
of which you are all aware that are compelling enough to inspire many people who otherwise
believe in the eye for an eye justice to oppose it.
As Gandhi said, an eye for an eye, an eye for an eye ends in making everybody blind.
But there is another more philosophical reason, one that gets at the nature of human beings
and the proper role of government.
Gandhi said, capital punishment is the most premeditated of murder, if the death penalty
ever just is a society operating at its highest moral level when its only remedy against violent
crime is to kill.
Are we not a bankrupt society when we do not allow the possibility for change, rehabilitation
and redemption?
There is no excuse for any country, for any state in any part of the world in the 21st
century to continue to execute the citizens.
Some nations had applied this barbaric practice for centuries at an unsinkable cost.
That cost is both ethical and financial, but most of all it is a horrendous cost of human
life and innocent life.
I call for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty, the time is now.
Let us not add to the ranks of those thousands of death who have already been executed, victims
of an unfair and brutal penal system.
The death penalty is not justice.
Thank you very much.
