I then came to the plaza in front of Oakland City Hall. The last time I had been there was to hear Senator Obama in May of 2008 ask for our support for his candidacy. Last night, the plaza was filled with hundreds of people talking in small circles. I heard earnest conversations about how the Occupy Oakland folks were interacting with each other. As I continued walking around, I was struck by how serious these folks were.

Two young women then told those assembled that they had to wrap up their conversations. They asked one representative from each group to come up and talk about the topic they had all been given to discuss: “How is privilege a part of the Occupy Oakland movement?” Folks were instructed to line up behind a man named Sweet Potato. I loved that and wondered if he often said “Who yam I?”

The crowd was filled with young people, but the first speaker was a 70-year-old woman who did not start off talking about race or class. She said that she envied the energy and physical dexterity of the young. She also said that the activists should make sure that those with physical impairments or with hearing difficulties were treated with respect and had their needs taken into account during the occupation. I smiled.

I then left feeling conspicuous in a dress and stockings. I had started the evening at a wake for the daughter of a friend whose 22-year-old daughter had suffocated after having an epileptic seizure. It was a very sad, sad moment. All the parents had a common refrain. “This is a parent’s worst nightmare.”

We hugged each other and cried and let old grievances and hurts wash away with our tears. A colleague and a friend had a similar reaction to seeing young people look at one of their friends in a coffin. They both said that young people in Oakland frequently are in funeral homes and mortuaries viewing the bodies of fallen friends. That realization deepened our collective grief.

Yet later that evening at Occupy Oakland, I brushed by young Black men walking through the encampment. I thought that perhaps the Occupy Wall Street movement might provide a way out of the misery and despair that sometimes leads to violence. One can only hope.

Life is good and goes on in Oakland.

“Troy’s execution, the exceptional unfairness of it, will only hasten the end of the death penalty in the United States,” wrote Ben Jealous of the NAACP last night. “The world will remember the name of Troy Anthony Davis. In death he will live on as a symbol of a broken justice system that kills an innocent man while a murderer walks free.”

The Equal Justice Society sees the death penalty as one of the most egregious manifestations of discrimination in our country. Eva Paterson last year wrote a personal and compelling post about how the death penalty disproportionately impacts Blacks and Latinos and we have continued to engage in anti-death penalty efforts.

Last month, the EJS legal team traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, the birthplace of the civil rights movement, where we met with death penalty litigators from around the country to identify strategies to overturn McCleskey v. Kemp, a 1987 Supreme Court case in which a habeas petitioner presented statistical evidence showing grave disparities in the imposition of the death penalty in Georgia.

EJS is ready to end California’s dysfunctional death penalty and we need your help!

The SAFE California Campaign was launched last month to replace the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole and create the SAFE CA Fund for local law enforcement to keep our families and communities safe.

We need your help to ensure that California voters see the SAFE CA Act on the ballot in 2012. On October 20, the SAFE CA Campaign will officially begin gathering signatures from across the state to place the initiative on the ballot in November 2012. We’ll need over half a million signatures – a tall order, but one our network of volunteers and activists is ready for. Please stand with us and lend a hand to end the death penalty.

Here are ways that you can help:

• Signature Gatherers comb their communities for people to sign the petition to put the SAFE CA Act on the ballot. They are the backbone of our community activist network and will ensure that Californians get a chance to vote for a SAFE California.
• Community Captains recruit, organize, and train Signature Gatherers. These are the fearless leaders for teams of Signature Gatherers in communities around the state, providing guidance and motivation for activists.
• Phone Bankers reach out to their fellow Californians by phone, recruiting volunteers and educating voters from the comfort of their own home or their local campaign HQ.

We’re ready to dump the death penalty in California in favor of real public safety solutions.

Sign up today to join the SAFE CA campaign to to end California’s dysfunctional death penalty.

On August 11, 2009, North Carolina Governor Perdue took an affirmative step in providing racial justice advocates a tool to ferret out racial bias in the criminal justice by signing the North Carolina Racial Justice Act.

The Racial Justice Act, the product of a concerted effort by legislators and racial justice advocates, provides defendants in capital cases the opportunity to argue that their death sentence or charge was based on race in court.  In doing so, North Carolina confronts the real and deplorable fact of racial injustice in death penalty process. The RJA leads the way in rooting out race as a basis for the death penalty though it does not necessarily ensure racial justice.  Efforts and legislative actions such as these are deeply needed.

Study after study exposes that racial disparities remain rampant in capital cases, from jury selection through the sentencing phase.  Specifically in North Carolina, a report authored by faculty of the Michigan State University College of Law reveals that those charged with murdering white victims are 2.6% more likely to end up on death row than those charged with murdering a person of color.

North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act allows defendants to present statistical evidence to challenge the prosecutor’s decision to seek the death penalty or the actual capital punishment sentence.  If the state cannot specifically refute the evidence, the judge must order that the prosecutor not seek the death penalty, or, if the defendant has already been sentenced to death, that sentence must be substituted with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Republicans in North Carolina have been calling for the RJA’s repeal and have challenged it in court. They claim the law is too vague to fit with the North Carolina Constitution, but the RJA survived its first court challenge when a judge rejected that argument.  Republicans have attempted to repeal the RJA in the legislature, but Democrats have managed to table that discussion until May of 2012.

Meanwhile, nearly all of North Carolina’s 158 death row convicts are challenging their death penalties through the RJA.

The first hearing is slated for later this summer when Marcus Robinson, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a white teenager, will allege that his death sentence was based on racial biases.  He will present statistical evidence showing that the race of the victim has been a significant factor in the decision for prosecutors to seek the death penalty in the county where he stood trial, that defendants of color in his county are much more likely to receive the death penalty than white defendants, and that significant racial disparities pervade the jury selection process.

In Robinson’s case, the state struck 50% of all qualified jurors of color, compared to only 14.8% of all other qualified jurors.  Robinson’s case is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of jury selection.  In fact, the case of Kenneth Rouse focuses on him being one of thirty-three death row inmates in North Carolina sentenced to death by an all-white jury.

Overt acts by district attorneys are also at issue here.  There is the especially startling case of Guy LeGrande, a black defendant who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury despite being declared mentally incompetent to be executed.  He was prosecuted by a district attorney known for wearing a lapel pin in the shape of a noose to court and who gave similar pins to assistant district attorneys who secured death penalty convictions.  This is the same district attorney who made allusions to a noose by telling jurors that “as the evidence mounted and became overwhelming, those strings were bound into a rope.  A rope.”

As North Carolina paves the way in capital punishment reform, other states are following. Last year, the California legislature failed to pass its own version of the Racial Justice Act.  We cannot afford to let that defeat be the end of the battle for racial justice in capital punishment cases.

In 1987 the United States Supreme Court was presented statistical evidence showing that the race of the victim played a significant role in whether a defendant would receive the death penalty.  The Court ultimately decided that the statistical study did prove that the sentence violated the Eight and Fourteenth Amendments.  The author of that opinion, Justice Powell, later expressed that he would change his vote if he could.  By 2011, the findings have not changed. It is unacceptable that race discrimination continues to saturate the death penalty process.  Through litigation, advocacy, education, and policy efforts, North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act can become a tool for  racial justice advocates to challenge racial disparities and eventually abolish the death penalty.

Eva joined Stephanie Bloomingdale, secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO in recalling that April 4 marked the anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was killed while supporting a strike of public employees – garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee.

See this post for more details and photos.  (Photo by David Bacon.)

“Federal equal opportunity programs, such as the one at issue in this case, are critically important to ensuring that businesses owned by women and people of color are not unfairly shut out of jobs and contracts,” said Sara Jackson, staff attorney at Equal Justice Society (EJS). “We are pleased that the judge was receptive to the breadth of evidence we presented indicating that marketplace discrimination continues to be a barrier for women and people of color.”

The San Diego Chapter of Associated General Contractors filed the lawsuit–-Associated General Contractors of America v. California Department of Transportation–-in the U.S. District Court in Sacramento in 2009, seeking to invalidate the program. Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area (Lawyers’ Committee), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation of Northern California, EJS and the law firm Bingham McCutchen LLP represented the Coalition for Economic Equity and the San Diego Chapter of the NAACP in the suit. The groups moved for summary judgment in the case, requesting that the judge uphold Caltrans’ Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program. Yesterday, summary judgment was granted, enabling the program’s efforts to ensure equitable contracting for small businesses to continue.

“Small businesses owned by women and minorities are a vital part of our State, employing thousands of Californians and strengthening the communities where they are located. It is essential that these businesses be allowed to compete on an equal basis for federally funded contracts,” stated Oren Sellstrom, Associate Director of Policy and Programs for the Lawyers’ Committee.

“Caltrans’ equal opportunity program is a smart practice that gives businesses a fair shot at competing for federal contracts,” said Jory Steele, Managing Attorney at the ACLU of Northern California.

“We are pleased with the Court’s decision,” added Sujal Shah, counsel at Bingham McCutchen. “It reaffirms a long line of decisions that recognize the importance of these types of programs in combating discrimination.”

Caltrans’ Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program has established a framework for ensuring fair participation in federally funded public works projects in California but has faced challenges. In 2006, Caltrans suspended the program’s race- and gender-conscious elements after a federal appeals court ruled that states had to document the existence of discrimination in the awarding of contracts. As a result, minority- and women-owned business participation on Caltrans’ federally funded projects plummeted — from nearly 11 percent in 2005 to just over 2 percent in 2009.

In 2007, an extensive disparity study commissioned by Caltrans documented discrimination against small businesses owned by women and minorities in federally funded contracts. Caltrans then sought approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to reinstate the suspended elements as a necessary remedy to such discrimination. DOT granted its approval in August 2008, noting that Caltrans has a duty under federal law to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not funneled into an exclusionary contracting system. In June 2009, Caltrans’ procedures were challenged in the lawsuit filed by the Associated General Contractors.