http://www.lesinrocks.com/2014/03/05/actualite/condamne-mort-americain-ecrit-lettre-ouverte-la-peine-de-mort-doit-etre-abolie-11485278/
(version française)
Texas death row inmate
Ray Jasper is scheduled to be put to death on March 19. He has written us a
letter that, he acknowledges, "could be my final statement on earth." It is well
worth your time.
Ray Jasper was
convicted of participating in the 1998 robbery and murder of recording
studio owner David Alejandro. A teenager at the time of the crime, Jasper was
sentenced to death. He wrote
to us once before, as part of our Letters from Death Row
series. That letter was remarkable for its calmness, clarity, and insight into
life as a prisoner who will never see freedom. We wrote back and invited him to
share any other thoughts he might have. Today, we received the letter below.
Everyone should read it.
Mr. Nolan,
When I first
responded to you, I didn't think that it would cause people to reach out to me
and voice their opinions. I've never been on the internet in my life and I'm not
fully aware of the social circles on the internet, so it was a surprise to
receive reactions so quickly.
I learned that
some of the responses on your website were positive and some negative. I can
only appreciate the conversation. Osho once said that one person considered him
like an angel and another person considered him like a devil, he didn't attempt
to refute neither perspective because he said that man does not judge based on
the truth of who you are, but on the truth of who they are.
Your words
struck a chord with me. You said that my perspective is different and therefore
my words have a sort of value. Yet, you're talking to a young man that's been
judged unworthy to breathe the same air you breathe. That's like a hobo on the
street walking up to you and you ask him for spare change.
Without any
questions, you've given me a blank canvas. I'll only address what's on my heart.
Next month, the State of Texas has resolved to kill me like some kind of rabid
dog, so indirectly, I guess my intention is to use this as some type of platform
because this could be my final statement on earth.
I think
'empathy' is one of the most powerful words in this world that is expressed in
all cultures. This is my underlining theme. I do not own a dictionary, so I
can't give you the Oxford or Webster definition of the word, but in my own
words, empathy means 'putting the shoe on the other foot.'
Empathy. A rich
man would look at a poor man, not with sympathy, feeling sorrow for the
unfortunate poverty, but also not with contempt, feeling disdain for the man's
poverish state, but with empathy, which means the rich man would put himself in
the poor man's shoes, feel what the poor man is feeling, and understand what it
is to be the poor man.
Empathy breeds
proper judgement. Sympathy breeds sorrow. Contempt breeds arrogance. Neither are
proper judgements because they're based on emotions. That's why two people can
look at the same situation and have totally different views. We all feel
differently about a lot of things. Empathy gives you an inside view. It doesn't
say 'If that was me...', empathy says, 'That is me.'
What that does
is it takes the emotions out of situations and forces us to be honest with
ourselves. Honesty has no hidden agenda. Thoreau proposed that 'one honest man'
could morally regenerate an entire society.
Looking through
the eyes of empathy & honesty, I'll address some of the topics you
mentioned. It's only my perspective.
The Justice
system is truly broken beyond repair and the sad part is there is no way to
start over. Improvements can be made. If honest people stand up, I think they
will be made over time. I know the average person isn't paying attention to all
the laws constantly being passed by state & federal legislation. People are
more focused on their jobs, raising kids and trying to find entertainment in
between time. The thing is, laws are being changed right and left.
A man once said
that revolution comes when you inform people of their rights. Martin Luther King
said a revolution comes by social action and legal action working hand in hand.
I'm not presenting any radical revolutionary view, the word revolution just
means change. America changes as the law changes.
Under the 13th
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution all prisoners in America are considered
slaves. We look at slavery like its a thing of the past, but you can go to any
penitentiary in this nation and you will see slavery. That was the reason for
the protests by prisoners in Georgia in 2010. They said they were tired of being
treated like slaves. People need to know that when they sit on trial juries and
sentence people to prison time that they are sentencing them to slavery.
If a prisoner
refuses to work and be a slave, they will do their time in isolation as a
punishment. You have thousands of people with a lot of prison time that have no
choice but to make money for the government or live in isolation. The affects of
prison isolation literally drive people crazy. Who can be isolated from human
contact and not lose their mind? That was the reason California had an uproar
last year behind Pelican Bay. 33,000 inmates across California protested
refusing to work or refusing to eat on hunger-strikes because of those being
tortured in isolation in Pelican Bay.
I think prison
sentences have gotten way out of hand. People are getting life sentences for
aggravated crimes where no violence had occurred. I know a man who was 24 years
old and received 160 years in prison for two aggravated robberies where less
that $500 was stole and no violence took place. There are guys walking around
with 200 year sentences and they're not even 30 years old. Its outrageous.
Giving a first time felon a sentence beyond their life span is pure oppression.
Multitudes of young people have been thrown away in this generation.
The other side
of the coin is there are those in the corporate world making money off
prisoners, so the longer they're in prison, the more money is being made. It's
not about crime & punishment, it's about crime & profit. Prison is a
billion dollar industry. In 1996, there were 122 prisons opened across America.
Companies were holding expos in small towns showing how more prisons would boost
the economy by providing more jobs.
How can those
that invest in prisons make money if people have sentences that will allow them
to return to free society? If people were being rehabilitated and sent back into
the cities, who would work for these corporations? That would be a bad
investment. In order for them to make money, people have to stay in prison and
keep working. So the political move is to tell the people they're tough on crime
and give people longer sentences.
Chuck Colson,
former advisor to the President once said that they were passing laws to be
tough on crime, but they didn't even know who the laws were affecting. It wasn't
until the Watergate scandal and Colson himself going to prison that he learned
who the laws were affecting. Colson ended up forming the largest prison ministry
in America. He also foreseen in his book THE GOD OF SPIDERS & STONES that
America was forming a new society within its prisons. Basically, that prison
would become a nation inside this nation. He predicted that over a million
people would be locked up by the year 2000. The book was written in the 8O's.
Now, its 2014 and almost two million people are locked up. It's not that crime
is the issue. Crime still goes on daily. It's that the politics surrounding
crime have changed and it has become a numbers game. Dollars & Cents. You
have people like Michael Jordan who invest millions of dollars in the prison
system. Any shrewed businessman would if you have no empathy for people locked
up and you just want to make some money.
I don't agree
with the death penalty. It's a very Southern practice from that old lynching
mentality. Almost all executions take place in the South with a few exceptions
here and there. Texas is the leading State by far. I'm not from Texas. I was
raised in California. Coming from the West Coast to the South was like going
back in time. I didn't even think real cowboys existed. Texas is a very
'country' state, aside a few major cities. There are still small towns that a
black person would not be welcomed. California is more of a melting pot. I grew
up in the Bay Area where its very diverse.
The death
penalty needs to be abolished. Life without parole is still a death sentence.
The only difference is time. To say you need to kill a person in a shorter
amount of time is just seeking revenge on that person.
If the death
penalty must exist, I think it should only be for cases where more than one
person is killed like these rampant shootings that have taken place around the
country the last few years. Also, in a situation of terrorism.
If you're not
giving the death penalty for murder, then the government is already saying that
the taking of one's life is not worth the death penalty. Capital murder is if
you take someone's life and commit another felony at the same time. That's Texas
law. That makes a person eligible for the death penalty The problem is, you're
not getting the death penalty for murder, you're actually getting it for the
other felony. That doesn't make common sense. You can kill a man but you will
not get the death penalty......if you kill a man and take money out his wallet,
now you can get the death penalty.
I'm on death
row and yet I didn't commit the act of murder. I was convicted under the law of
parties. When people read about the case, they assume I killed the victim, but
the facts are undisputed that I did not kill the victim. The one who killed him
plead guilty to capital murder for a life sentence. He admitted to the murder
and has never denied it. Under the Texas law of parties, they say it doesn't
matter whether I killed the victim or not, I'm criminally responsible for
someone else's conduct. But I was the only one given the death penalty.
The law of
parties is a very controversial law in Texas. Most Democrats stand against it.
It allows the state to execute someone who did not commit the actual act of
murder. There are around 50 guys on death row in Texas who didn't kill anybody,
but were convicted as a party.
The lethal
injection has become a real controversial issue here of late because states are
using drugs that they're not authorize to use to execute people. The lethal
injection is an old Nazi practice deriving from the Jewish Holocaust. To use
that method to kill people today, when it's unconstitutional to use it on dogs,
is saying something very cruel and inhumane. People don't care because they
think they're killing horrible people. No empathy. Just contempt.
I understand
that it's not popular to talk about race issues these days, but I speak on the
subject of race because I hold a burden in my heart for all the young blacks who
are locked up or who see the street life as the only means to make something of
themselves. When I walked into prison at 19 years old, I said to myself 'Damn, I
have never seen so many black dudes in my life'. I mean, it looked like I went
to Africa. I couldn't believe it. The lyrics of 2Pac echoed in my head, 'The
penitentiary is packed/ and its filled with blacks'.
It's really an
epidemic, the number of blacks locked up in this country. That's why I look, not
only at my own situation, but why all of us young blacks are in prison. I've
come to see, it's largely due to an indentity crisis. We don t know our history.
We don't know how to really indentify with white people. We are really of a
different culture, but by being slaves, we lost ourselves.
When you have a
black man name John Williams and a white man name John Williams, the black man
got his name from the white man. Within that lies a lost of identity. There are
blacks in this country that don't even consider themselves African. Well, what
are we? When did we stop being African? If you ask a young black person if
they're African, they will say 'No, I'm American'. They've lost their roots.
They think slavery is their roots. Again, its a strong identity crisis.
You take the
identity crisis, mix it with capitalism, where money comes before empathy, and
you'll have a lot of young blacks trying to get money by any means because
they're trying to get out of poverty or stay out of poverty. Now, money is what
they try to find an identity in. They feel like if they get rich, legal or
illegal, they've become somebody. Which in America is partly true because
superficially we hail the rich and despise the poor. We give Jay-Z more credit
than we do Al Sharpton. What has Jay-Z done besides get rich? Yet we see dollar
signs and somehow give more respect to the man with the money.
A French woman
who moved to America asked me one day, 'Why don't black kids want to learn?' Her
husband was a high school teacher. She said the white and asian kids excel in
school, but the black and hispanic kids don't. I said that all kids want to
learn, it's just a matter of what you're trying to teach them. Cutting a frog
open is not helping a black kid in the ghetto who has to listen to police sirens
all night and worry about getting shot. Those kids need life lessons. They need
direction. When you have black kids learning more about the Boston Tea Party
than the Black Panther Party, I guarantee you won't keep their attention. But it
was the Black Panther Party that got them free lunch.
People point
their fingers at young blacks, call them thugs and say they need to pull up
their pants. That's fine, but you're not feeding them any knowledge. You're not
giving them a vision. All you're saying is be a square like me. They're not
going to listen to you because you have guys like Jay-Z and Rick Ross who are
millionaires and sag their pants. Changing the way they dress isn't changing the
way they think. As the Bible says, 'Where there's no vision the people perish'.
Young blacks need to learn their identity so they can have more respect for the
blacks that suffered for their liberties than they have for someone talking
about selling drugs over a rap beat who really isn't selling drugs.
They have to be
exposed to something new. Their minds have to be challenged, not dulled. They
know the history of the Crips & Bloods, but they can't tell you who Garvey
or Robeson is. They can quote Drake & Lil Wayne but they can't tell you what
Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton has done. Across the nation, they gravitate to
Crips & Bloods. I tell those I know the same thing, not to put blue &
red before black. They were black first. It's senseless, but they are trying to
find a purpose to live for and if a gang gives them a sense of purpose that's
what they will gravitate to. They aren't being taught to live and die for
something greater. They're not being challenged to do better.
Black history
shouldn't be a month, it should be a course, an elective taught year around. I
guarantee black kids would take that course if it was available to them. How
many black kids would change their outlook if they knew that they were only
considered 3/5's of a human being according to the U.S Constitution? That black
people were considered part animal in this country. They don't know that. When
you learn that, you carry yourself with a different level of dignity for all
we've overcome.
Before Martin
Luther King was killed he drafted a bill called 'The Bill for the
Disadvantaged'. It was for blacks and poor whites. King understood that in order
to have a successful life, you have to decrease the odds of failure. You have to
change the playing field. I'm not saying there's no personal responsibility for
success, that goes without saying, but there's also a corporate responsibility.
As the saying goes, when you see someone who has failed, you see someone who was
failed.
Neither am I
saying that advantages are always circumstancial. Sometimes its knowledge or
opportunity that gives an advantage. A lot of times it is the circumstances.
Flowers grow in gardens, not in hard places. Using myself as an example, I was
15 when my first love got shot 9 times in Oakland. Do you think I m going to
care about book reports when my girlfriend was shot in the face? I understand
Barack Obama saying there is no excuse for blacks or anyone else because
generations past had it harder than us. That's true. However, success is based
on probabilities and the odds. Everyone is not on a level playing field. For
some, the odds are really stacked against them. I'm not saying they can't be
overcome, but it's not likely.
I'm not trying
to play the race card, I'm looking at the roots of why so many young blacks are
locked up. The odds are stacked against us, we suffer from an identity crisis,
and we're being targeted more, instead of taught better. Ask any young black
person their views on the Police, I assure you their response will not be
positive. Yet if you have something against the Police, who represent the
government, you cannot sit on a trial jury. A young black woman was struck from
the jury in my case because she said she sees the Police
as
'intimidators'. She never had a good experience with the Police like most young
blacks, but even though she's just being true to her experience, she's not
worthy to take part as a juror in a trial.
White people
really don't understand how it extreme it is to be judged by others outside your
race. In the book TRIAL & ERROR: THE TEXAS DEATH PENALTY Lisa Maxwell paints
this picture to get the point across and if any white person reading this is
honest with themselves, they will clearly understand the point. I cannot quote
it word for word, but this was the gist of it...
Imagine you're
a young white guy facing capital murder charges where you can receive the death
penalty... the victim in the case is a black man... when you go to trial and
step into the courtroom... the judge is a black man... the two State prosecutors
seeking the death penalty on you... are also black men... you couldn't afford an
attorney, so the Judge appointed you two defense lawyers who are also black
men... you look in the jury box... there's 8 more black people and 4
hispanics... the only white person in the courtroom is you... How would you feel
facing the death penalty? Do you believe you'll receive justice?
As outside of
the box as that scene is, those were the exact circumstances of my trial. I was
the only black person in the courtroom.
Again, I'm not
playing the race card, but empathy is putting the shoe on the other
foot.
The last thing
on my heart is about religion and the death penalty. There are several
well-known preachers in Texas and across the South that teach their
congregations that the death penalty is right by God and backed by the Bible.
The death penalty is a governmental issue not a spiritual issue. Southern
preachers who advocate the death penalty are condoning evil. They need to learn
the legalities of capital punishment. The State may have the power to put people
to death, but don't preach to the public that it's God's will. It's the State's
will.
If God wanted
me to die for anything, I would be dead already. I talk to God everday. He's not
telling me I'm some kind of menace that He can't wait to see executed. God is
blessing me daily. God is showing me His favor & grace on my life. Like Paul
said, I was the chief of sinners, but God had mercy on me because He knew I was
ignorant. The blood of Abel cryed vengeance, the blood of Jesus cryed mercy.
There are
preachers like John Hagee in San Antonio who have influence over thousands of
people, who not only attend his church, but also watch his TV program, and hear
him condoning the death penalty. Hagee doesn't see his Southern mentality
condones the death penalty, not the scriptures. There is absolutely nothing in
the Bible that condones the way Texas executes people today.
Southern
preachers use scriptures like God telling Noah, 'Whoever shed's man's blood, by
man his blood shall be shed'. 'That's murder. Under Texas law, you cannot
receive the death penalty for murder. There is no such thing as capital murder
in the Bible, where murder must be in the course of another felony. Yet, they
preach capital punishment is God's
will. Even if
you're guilty of capital murder in Texas, it doesn't mean you'll receive the
death penalty. People get the death penalty when a jury has judged them to be a
'continuing threat to society'. 'That means they are deemed so bad that they
have no hope of redemption or change in their behavior. That is the only reason
a person gets the death penalty. They are suppose to be the absolute worse of
the worse, so terrible that they cannot live in prison with other murderers.
That in itself
is contrary to the whole Christian faith that believes no one is beyond
redemption if they repent for their sins and put their faith in Jesus Christ.
For a Christian to advocate the death penalty is a complete contradiction.
As easy as it
is for a preacher to stand up in the pulpit with a Bible and tell thousands of
people the death penalty is right, I challenge any preacher in Texas, John Hagee
or any others to come visit me and tell me that God wants me to die. Martin
Luther King said, 'Capital punishment shows that America is a merciless nation
that will not forgive.'
Again, Mr.
Nolan, this is only my perspective. I'm just the hobo on the street giving away
my pennies. A doctor can't look at a person and see cancer, they have to look
beyond the surface. When you look at the Justice system, the Death Penalty, or
anything else, it takes one to go beyond the surface. Proper diagnosis is half
the cure.
I'm a father.
My daughter was six weeks old when I got locked up and now she's 15 in high
school. Despite the circumstances, I've tryed to be the best father in the
world. But I knew that her course in life is largely determine by what I teach
her. It's the same with any young person, their course is determined by what we
are teaching them. In the words of Aristotle, 'All improvement in society begins
with the education of the young.'
Sincerely,
Ray L.
Jasper
Ps: Forgive me
for being longwinded, but I was speaking from the heart. Thanks for the
opportunity.
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