Eva authored this guest post on Jan. 11 for the SAFE California Campaign site.

My fiancé, Steve Henry, was murdered in Kingston, Jamaica, on November 25, 1997. As bizarre as this may sound, one of the thoughts I had as the initial shock wore off, was “Well, am I still against the death penalty?” My answer then and now is a resounding “YES”. The death penalty is wrong.

I will be thinking of Steve this weekend as Rev. Jesse Jackson, the California NAACP, and civil rights leaders throughout the state come together to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We are all supporting the SAFE California campaign to end death sentences. Dr. King once said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?’” I plan to honor Steve’s memory and Dr. King’s passionate commitment to justice.

Will you join us to honor justice and Dr. King?

The SAFE California campaign is sponsored by a broad coalition of justice organizations who are all joined in the commitment to replace the death penalty to protect the innocent, save our very limited state resources, and improve safety in our communities. SAFE is working hard to get the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed to qualify the “Savings, Accountability, and Full Enforcement for California Act” ballot initiative in time for the November 2012 election.

I am proud to say that my organization, Equal Justice Society, sits on the SAFE California Campaign Steering Committee. We at Equal Justice Society, like Dr. King and his wife Coretta Scott King, have always been opposed to the death penalty and advocated for an end to this risky and costly punishment. I am also proud to say that many of the dedicated members of Equal Justice Society will be joining the thousands of volunteers statewide who are ready to commemorate Dr. King’s leadership by joining this historic movement over MLK weekend.

Coretta Scott King declared, “As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses.” I know how difficult that statement is to make and I agree wholeheartedly.

Please join me to honor the King family and all victims of senseless violence by making a commitment to justice this coming weekend.

In peace,
Eva Paterson

- Written by Eva Paterson, President and Co-Founder of the Equal Justice Society and guest blogger for the SAFE California Campaign

Anthony Graves, father of three and an African American man with no violent past, was on death row in Texas for more than a decade despite his innocence before being exonerated. Now, Anthony spends his time speaking out about the injustice of the death penalty. He is headlining a panel hosted by the Equal Justice Society on December 7, exploring how we can understand the death penalty in the context of modern-day racism in America. The panel also highlights the need to develop a cohesive legal strategy to reclaim the 14th Amendment as a tool to combat modern-day racism. We talked with Anthony about his long fight for freedom and his work to replace the death penalty with life without parole to eliminate the grave risk of executing innocent people.

Give us a brief background on your case.
In 1992, there was a crime in a little small town known as Somerville, Texas. There were six victims; four of them were children, one was a teenager, and one was a grandmother. They were shot, stabbed and bludgeoned to death, and then the house was set on fire. The guy that was thought to be a person of interest in the case was the father of one of the children. The police interrogated this man for hours, and then they told him that if he gave them someone’s name, they would let him go. He called out my name, not thinking that they were going to arrest me, because he was giving them a wild story. Well, I was arrested and I ended up on death row for 18 years for a crime I did not commit. Even after my case was overturned by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals for egregious prosecutorial misconduct, I ended up staying at the local county jail for four more years, in isolation, because they refused to admit they made a mistake. Several prosecutors were assigned by the county to retry my case, and for one reason or another they got off the case. The last prosecutor, Kelly Siegler, was known as a tough-as-nails prosecutor because she had already put 19 men on death row. She came in and, for the first time in 18 years, my case was investigated. What she found out was very shocking to her, and she called it the criminal justice system’s worst nightmare. She went to the judge and asked the judge to sign the dismissal order because I was innocent.

What kept you fighting for 18 years? What kept you from giving up?
Living on death row was hell, because you had no control over your life. You had absolutely no say so about what you could do throughout the day. Your life was controlled by guards, 18- or 19-year-old guards fresh out of high school, who had the right to disrespect you and treat you as less than the man that you were. And you had conditions that were so inhumane that guys were giving up their appeals, committing suicide, attempting to commit suicide or going totally insane. That still is going on today on Texas Death Row. What kept me strong was that I knew I was innocent. I was naïve enough to believe that you just can’t take a man from his home for a crime that took place in another town that he wasn’t even in, falsely convict him, and then murder him. I refused to believe we had a criminal justice system like that even though I was there long enough to witness Texas executing more than 300 men. But, because I didn’t want to give up, I allowed my naiveté to keep me strong. In the meantime, they gave me two execution dates – which makes it clear to me that Texas is executing innocent people. How do I know? They tried to execute me twice for a crime I did not commit.

Three hundred people executed over 12 and half years?
Texas was breaking execution records set by Texas. They were competing with themselves to break their own records. We would be naïve to believe they never got it wrong. I used to cry about it a lot at night, and I promised myself that when I got out of prison, not only was I going to work to help the guys I left behind, I was also going to tell the rest of the world what was happening on death row. I hope and pray that I am effective enough and clear enough about how the death penalty is totally inhumane, and how inhumane it makes us look. We are the only nation, the only democratic nation, acting like a third world country when it comes to our criminal justice system. We are supposed to be the nation that leads the world. Yet, we have created a system that threatens the life of innocent people. As of today, 139 people have been exonerated from death in the United States. And, yet, we are still killing. How many did we get wrong?

Would you still call yourself “naïve” about how justice in America is carried out?
I am no longer naïve. Our criminal justice system needs to be reformed. I say to the American people, where is the outrage? It could be your son or your daughter or your father or your mother next. Do not think it can’t happen to you, because it happened to me. We have a death penalty system that is killing innocent people, not just in the state of Texas but also in other states that have the death penalty. Anyone — anyone — would be naïve to believe otherwise. It is sad to me that there is no real outrage about it, not just from people on the street but from those we vote in to office to protect and serve us.

How is life now that you are free?
I am trying to rebuild it. It is so different from the life I had before. I am on a mission to alert the American people that our criminal justice system has turned against us. They are killing us for crimes we did not commit. We need to wake up and say: No, this is not the system that we want. Now, I spend every moment of my life traveling and educating people about the injustice of the death penalty and telling people what happened to me. Sharing my story, sharing my insight. I work for a nonprofit organization that represents people on death row, and I also travel around the world to educate people. I go anywhere to talk to anyone who is willing to hear my story. My life is totally dedicated to exposing the injustice of the death penalty. The guys I left behind, some of them are innocent, some of them are mentally ill, and Texas still wants to murder them for a crime they may or may not have committed. Don’t believe me? Ask the 139 others who have walked off death row in the United States. Ask their families and their mothers. I could be doing a lot of other things with my life. Texas compensated me for this wrongful conviction. But I am here talking about the death penalty and how wrong it is simply because I know it’s true. And I just can’t stand by without telling people what I know.

Do you think the death penalty should be replaced with life without parole?
One innocent life is one too many to waste, so therefore we should not be tinkering with the death penalty. America needs to know that we are wasting a lot of money murdering precious life. We have a system that has run amok, and we are all in the way. We are spending more money to execute one person than we are to keep that person in prison for the rest of his or her life.

Thank you for sharing your story with us. What compels you to keep telling it?
I feel like if I stop, someone else is going to be murdered who is probably innocent. Knowing that, I have to keep telling my story until I can ensure that no one innocent can be executed. That drives me to tell my story, when- and wherever I can.

How can people help?
Whoever has whatever platform out there, allow me a few minutes of your time to get on your platform and share my story. It will be a tremendous help to righting this injustice. Please also consider supporting the nonprofit where I work, the Texas Defender Service.

The article outlines the urgent need for our courts to depart from an archaic disposition towards racism, which requires plaintiffs alleging discrimination to prove the intent to discriminate – not just that discrimination actually occurred. This standard of jurisprudence ignores the fact that racial bias in modern society is often not overt.

“Requiring proof of discriminatory intent essentially closes the courthouse doors to victims of racial bias,” writes Eva. “If there has ever been a law worth the struggle to change in modern society, this is it.” The article provides a wide-ranging overview of what led to the “Intent Standard” set by Washington v. Davis, and what we can do to overturn that decision and restore our constitutional safeguards against discrimination.

In many ways, the article is a manifesto of our work at the Equal Justice Society. Fabián Rentería, Abby Bar-Lev, Jihan Spearman and I all worked with Eva on the article.

The publication of this article fittingly coincides with the beginning of my time at EJS and the beginning of the next phase of our litigation and advocacy strategy. Before starting at EJS, I had the opportunity to visit Montgomery, Ala., for a meeting with death penalty litigators and activists.

Being in Montgomery was an eye-opening experience. We learned about prosecutors and judges (and even defense counsel) who did not want to address issues of race, or people who were never afforded the opportunity to serve on juries in their hometowns because of their race.

We talked about the disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system on people of color, both in terms of facing the death penalty and in charging and sentencing for crimes. We also explored downtown Montgomery and saw where slaves were led down Commerce Street (though there are no markers to commemorate this, or to show the auction block where they were taken).

On the way home from the trip, I was able to reflect on my time in Alabama, which had reinforced for me the fact that racism is alive and well, in both explicit and implicit forms.

But while it was discouraging to realize there is so much to be done to raise society’s consciousness about racism, it was also inspiring to stand in the spot where Rosa Parks stood as she boarded the bus, or to see the church where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., preached and where the Montgomery bus boycott was planned, and to know that the work EJS and our allies do to fight racism in all forms is crucial, and to keep hope alive that things will change.

Download a PDF of the issue.

Allison Elgart joined the Equal Justice Society as Supervising Attorney on October 4, 2011. She was formerly an associate in the San Francisco office of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, and previously clerked for the Hon. Robert P. Patterson, Jr., United States District Court, Southern District of New York. Allison is a 2005 graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and worked as a student attorney at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.

“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.

In the gathering, “Fighting McCleskey: A Tale of Two Theories,” the legal questions discussed include whether implicit and/or institutional bias theories could be used to support anti-death penalty litigation; if litigators should continue to utilize social science research to advance this work; and how an anti-discrimination approach could be useful in overturning the intent element of McCleskey. In the second decade of our work, EJS is tackling our biggest challenge, dismantling the “intent doctrine” as enunciated in Washington v. Davis.

Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a renowned non-profit organization that provides legal representation to indigent defendants and prisoners who have been denied fair and just treatment in the legal system, hosted the meeting. In addition to the EJS legal team, attendees at the meeting included Bryan Stevenson, executive director of EJI, and other seasoned death penalty litigators.

In McCleskey, a review of over 2,000 cases illustrated that the death penalty was assessed in 22 percent of cases involving black defendants and white victims, and just one percent of those involving black defendants and black victims. Application of the death penalty was 4.3 times higher when the defendant was charged with killing a white victim.

The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that, without evidence of conscious, deliberate bias by government actors, evidence of racial sentencing disparities in the death penalty was, “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.”

Outside of the convening, we visited the King Memorial Baptist Church, where Dr. King and others organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott. We stood where Rosa Parks stood right before boarding the bus. We walked down Commerce Street tracing the path that kidnapped Africans took as they left the boats that had just come up the Alabama River. We visited the place where these terrified and angry men, women, and children were sold into bondage.

We returned to California even more committed to the fight for equality and justice sparked decades ago.