Governor Rendell has a historic opportunity to honor a campaign pledge and put a stop to Pennsylvania’s archaic, ineffective and profoundly cruel and unfair death penalty.
Daylin Leach, a Democratic state senator from Montgomery County, last week introduced a bill that seeks to add Pennsylvania to the list of states like New Jersey, New Mexico and New York that have recently abandoned capital punishment.
Leach pointed out that Pennsylvania’s death penalty costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars because of the years and even decades of appeals to which death-row prisoners are entitled. At the same time, he said, the system has sent at least six demonstrably innocent people to death row.
When he first ran for governor in 2002, Rendell, who in his two terms as Philadelphia’s elected district attorney put more people on death row than any other DA in the state’s modern history, said that he would support a moratorium on executions if he were shown that such a move was “warranted.”
Only six weeks after he entered the governor’s mansion, a commission of retired judges and law-school presidents appointed earlier by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to study the state’s capital-punishment system did just that, issuing a 500-page report detailing rampant bias in the state’s legal system (two-thirds of those on the state’s death row are black and nearly all are poor).
The report called on all three branches of government, including the governor, to halt all executions until problems with the system can be analyzed and corrected through court reforms, new rules for prosecutors and changes in state law.
Governor Rendell ignored that report, and has subsequently signed more than 100 death warrants …
Please click here, to read the rest of this opinion piece.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy