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The innocent do die

But in their final moments

They dare not cry

The rage

Induced by unfairness

Begs expression

Demands a response

It is not just that the innocent die

But how they choose to die

Defiance is the way

To say

I am not afraid to see

The worse you can do to me

Do not go gentle into that good night

Dylan Thomas wrote

Let your stare

Express your might

You do not walk in eternal darkness alone

The love of those you left behin

Will always be the guiding light

That will sustain you

Until all our souls are joined

In God’s good grace

Let this ode

Reach your heart

You are still loved by many

So rest in peace, J.W.

You were

Soldier of misfortune

They must stop.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, America carried out 98 executions over the past five years—an average of 19 per year. Only 5 states and the federal government carried out executions in 2021.

The overwhelming majority of the 98 executions were carried out in Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri.

According to Amnesty International, of world’s 55 countries that still retain the death penalty, only 18 of them executed a total 483 people in 2020—an average of 25 per year by each country.

The overwhelmingly majority of those executions were carried out by China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Egypt.

Now what does Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri have in common with China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Egypt?

They are all racist, they disenfranchise their most vulnerable people, their criminal justice systems are incurably corrupt and totalitarian, and they all have a long history of lynch justice.

But let’s briefly examine the American death penalty for a moment.

It is virtually established within the bounds of normal logic that the death penalty is a byproduct of the systemic racism rooted in American criminal justice.

That said, let’s borrow a page from logic a moment—and I understand that logic is a difficult subject to deal with in today’s social debates, but let’s just give it a try.

That fact by itself makes the penalty inherently unfair.

There are currently roughly 2500 people on death rows in America.

If the country executed one of those persons every day, it would take approximately 8 years to kill them all off.

If the country maintained an average of 19 executions per year as it has over the past five years, it would take nearly 25 years to eliminate all current death row residents.

I don’t think—although I’m not quite sure—that America is prepared to undertake such a sustained human bloodletting.

Against that backdrop, logic demands a cessation of all executions and the elimination of the death penalty because under the current political and social conditions, it is impossible to equitably apply the death penalty in our diverse population and to fairly execute it.

The death penalty, as I see it, makes sense only to those several thousand people in Dallas awaiting the return of JFK and John, Jr. to return from the dead and reinstall Donald Trump as president. They draw their logic from eating dirt and drinking their own urine.

Folks, I’m not kidding. That is what hundreds, if not thousands, of people are doing in and around Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

And as sure as I am sitting here, these are the only people in this country—hailing from Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri—who can make sense out the current state of the death people.

A continuing moral dilemma faced by American society. Polls over the last decade reveal that Americans are all over the social and political map when it comes to the death penalty.

I know a thing or two about the death penalty. I was under a death sentence for six years before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 vacated it which was ultimately replaced with a life without parole sentence. The state of Louisiana did not carry out a single execution during that period of time.

I spent 40 years in the Louisiana prison system, compiling an impressive record of individual achievement and rehabilitation earning my parole release in 2006.

Renaldo Hudson knows more a thing or two about the death penalty as well. He spent 13 years on Illinois’ death row before his death sentence was also vacated and replaced with a life without parole sentence. The state of Illinois carried out twelve executions during his stay on death row.

Hudson spent 37 years in the Illinois prison system, also compiling an impressive record of individual achievement and rehabilitation earning his executive commutation release in 2020.

A Facebook friend recently sent me a link to an Op-Ed piece that Hudson published in Thruthout (an independent news outlet that focuses on injustices) on December 4, 2021 titled “I Survived Death Row, But I’ll Never Escape It.” The piece was well-written and amply stated the best case against the death penalty.

But there are two points from which I depart company with Hudson.

He said he felt “horror” as he watched twelve “friends” escorted from death row by “stolidly and indifferently” prison guards.

Four of those twelve friends were convicted of killing 41 people—28 of were children killed by the infamous “the Clown” serial killer John Wayne Gacy and 6 were killed execution style by Raymond Lee Stewart during a six-day crime spree because of his racial hatred of white people, for which he said he “deserved the death penalty.”

I could not, and would not, call John Wayne Gacy orRaymond Lee Stewart “friends” who were victims of a grave injustice by their executions.

I do not believe in the death penalty—even for the worst of the worst among us. That’s why I don’t think Gacy or Stewart should have been executed because no one should be executed, even the Adolph Eichmann’s among us. Those kinds of executions inflict more damage to the fundamental principle of individual salvation needed in a humane, decent society than the human horrors they inflicted upon society.

But don’t expect me to shed a tear about their execution.

The second point I take issue with in Hudson’s piece is the portrait he paints that guards and other people involved in the execution ritual are indifferent or callous. There have been, I am sure, indifferent and callous people involved in the more than 1500 executions carried out in the United States since 1976.

However, recurring news reports, books, and documentaries have revealed that almost everyone involved in these state-sanctioned executions—guards, chaplains, individuals who coordinate witnesses to the executions, and even the executioners themselves—have suffered some form of PTSD or other serious emotional/religious reservations about their involvement in the executions.

I am by no means a pro-prison guard advocate, but a responsibility to truth demands that what we say about a social issue as complex as the death penalty should be fact-based, not emotional-driven hyperbole. 

A contentious subject regardless of how it is approached, especially from a religious point of view.

It is difficult to discern between the myth and reality of abortion, especially in a social climate driven by conspiracy, misinformation, and racism—all of which infects the human spirit with hatred and division of every stripe. Logic has no quarter in this debate.

This is the social climate in which the abortion issue will not be decided, but inflamed, by any ruling the Supreme Court hands down on this issue before June 30, 2022.

But there is one religious myth—one preached by Christian evangelical ministers like Dr. James Dobson—that can, and should, be ruled out of the abortion debate.

This myth is that the life of an unborn is a “precious gift” from God.

God created the first two human lives in the Garden of Eden—and by all accounts He was not too pleased with Adam or Eve.

These two had actually been a bone of contention in Heaven long before their own creation. because God and his only Son, Jesus Christ, discussed the issue of human creation long before Adam and Eve became a reality.

These divine discussions, however, infuriated Lucifer, God’s most honored angel, because he had not been consulted about them.

Being left in the dark about this momentous issue stirred a loathing of Jesus by Lucifer, who was already jealous of Jesus’ relationship with God, that it prompted him to create a rebellion in Heaven. He solicited and secured the support of roughly a third of all the angels in Heaven who also apparently had their own petty beefs with God.

God tried to reason with Lucifer, even offering him a pardon if he would only return to obedience and servitude in God’s Kingdom. The offerings did not impress Lucifer who initiated a coup against God’s rule that not only got him and his cohorts thrown out of the Kingdom of Heaven but cast into the dark bowels of Hell where he became the King of Evil.

God and Jesus then fulfilled their plan to create humans in the image of God.

They placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden where after only a brief period Eve succumb to the temptation of Sin with a bite out of the apple. They fell into God’s disfavor as did the dozens, maybe even hundreds, of children they created together over the next 800 years or so—two of whom were named Cain and Abel.

As a life of sin would have it, the two brothers feuded like Lucifer and Jesus before Cain eventually slew Abel.

The divine fact is that Cain and Abel were not “precious gifts” of God either while they were in Eve’s womb or after they roamed the open fields of the earth before Cain fatally struck Abel down.

For the next thousands of years as chronicled in the Old Testament that was the true nature of man’s ability to  create life in a woman’s womb—birth from the Lucifer. That is what the unborn was in the ancient womb of woman—a demon seed implanted by a man.

Because of the Lucifer gene  as you might call it, things got so bad and evil all over the face of the Earth that God and Jesus were forced into deep consultation about how to save the soul of man.

Together, they decided the only way to save man from Lucifer’s reign was for Jesus to descend to the earth as God’s only begotten son to provide mankind with a promise of heavenly salvation.

God instructed Jesus to give mankind one—and only one—promise of salvation as spelled out in John 3:16 in the New Testament:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

And therein lays the paradox of the religious preaching about abortion by the likes of Dr. James Dobson:

A human being must be born before they can swear love and allegiance to God through Jesus Christ and can receive forgiveness from sin only by accepting Christ as the only begotten Son of God.

The unborn cannot be God’s ‘precious gift” until they are born and ask Jesus for forgiveness, the only pathway to becoming one of God’s “precious gifts.”

The seed of the unborn today as it gestates in a woman’s womb is no less, or no more, than the seed of Cain that gestated in Eve’s womb before its birth—a Lucifer seed.

Under God’s eye and according to all the historical rules of Heaven, we are all products of the Demon Seed until we are able and competent enough to seek and receive Jesus Christ’s acceptance and forgiveness.

Failure to do so … well, you pick your own choice of what happens then.

America loves to punish. It was part of the colonial DNA that white pilgrims brought to the “new land” from the old land of England. There was pillorying, burning at the stake, hanging, drawing, quartering, whippings, and a litany of other torturous punishments, sometimes for just pissing in public mud street.

After America became a full-fledged nation in 1791 with a ratified constitution, it began to experiment with both the need and purpose for such punishments. The pilgrims’ purposes for revenge and torture punishments had not worked too well in an expanding, land-grabbing nation, although these kinds of punishment were frequently inflicted on Native Americans, African-Americans, and immigrants from Ireland, China and Italy when they ventured out of their social class.

Thus, America, in many ways, was built not only on its ability to punish but in its innate willingness to inflict punishment.

By the 20^th century as time changed societies, America had pretty much settled on five purposes for punishment: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution and restitution.

Since 1900 under this five-purpose punishment-model, America has carried out nearly 9,000 executions and today has more than 200,000 people incarcerated in its prison system serving life sentences—that represents 83 percent of the people in the entire world serving life sentences, according to the Sentencing Project.

Of the life sentenced inmates, nearly 56,000 are serving their sentences without the benefit of parole. Plus, there are another 43,000 inmates serving what is known as “virtual life sentences”—sentences so long that they exceed life expectations.

Under the five-purpose punishment model, America now incarcerates roughly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although our nation represents only 5 percent of the world’s population

That is what the five-purpose punishment model has accomplished for America—the largest, most expensive, least effective, and one of the most brutal penal systems in the world.

There is one core fact about the America’s five-purpose punishment model—it has always disproportionately punished people of color, the economically disadvantaged, and the intellectually disenfranchised. This irrefutable fact demonstrates the historical systemic racism in this five-purpose punishment model—and I really don’t care how many “critical race theory” opponents would rather color this fact out of the history books.

Finally, here is the last example of the way the five-purpose punishment model works in real time:

On January 6, 2021, a white mob of insurrectionists—led by white supremacists groups the FBI has labeled “domestic terrorists“—stormed the nation’s Capitol Building. Many in that riotous mob had a specific intent to kill the Vice-President of the United States and its Speaker of the House of Representatives. Five people died as a result of the insurrection, four police officers committed suicide, hundreds of people were injured, dozens of Congressional members were either terrorized or traumatized, and millions of dollars in damage done to the Capitol Building.

Of the roughly 600 people arrested in the wake of the failed coup attempt, more than a dozen of them have been punished with probation, home detention, days of jail incarceration, and a couple with minor prison sentences, the longest being nearly 4 years.

Compare those punishments to the 4,000 life sentences imposed on drug offenders—two-third of whom are black or members of a minority ethnic group report the Sentencing Project—convicted in mostly minor drug deals that did not cause a loss of life or damage to property.

So, here we are: Kill a cop in an insurrection and get four years if you are white or sell a pound of weed and get a life sentence, sometimes without parole, if you are black.

The result: there are murderous white insurrectionists (through the “law of parties”) serving home detention while there are black petty criminals serving life sentences (under “three strikes”) for stealing a pizza.

There was a time in America during the Jim Crow era when a black man served more time in prison for killing a goat than a white man served for killing his wife.

The January 6 insurrection proves that America has once again embraced Jim Crow.