Today, thousands of prisoners around the country will be mailing letters to numerous death penalty abolitionist groups asking them to stop advocating for life without the possibility of parole as a supposedly humane alternative to lethal injection.
The Other Death Penalty Project, a group comprised solely of prisoners serving life without possibility of parole -- the other death penalty -- categorically rejects this hypocritical position taken by too many death penalty abolitionists. Death at the hands of the state, whether by lethal injection or lethal imprisonment, is the death penalty.
The Other Death Penalty Project, similarly, rejects the proposition that life without the possibility of parole is a necessary 1st step toward ultimate abolition of the death penalty. The distinction is one of method, not kind. Instead of moving to the elimination of death sentences, this tactic of trading slow executions for quick executions has resulted in an explosion of men and women sentenced to the slower method.
As a study published in the Harvard Law Review in 2006 entitled "A Matter of Life and Death" concluded, "The purpose of this Note is to argue that [L.W.O.P.] statutes are neither a necessary nor a particularly useful step toward eliminating the death penalty."
Death penalty abolitionists who advocate for life without the possibility of parole are wrong, both in their moral reasoning and in their tactics.
The Other Death Penalty Project plans to call these anti-death penalty groups out to a public accounting by speaking for the close to 40,000 men and women sentenced to face "worse than death," in the words of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. These prisoners live on the much bigger, much less well-publicized, death rows all around this country.
It's time to end all forms of the death penalty.
Other interested parties may write to The Other Death Penalty Project, P.O. Box 1486 Lancaster, CA, 93584.
Source: The Other Death Penalty Project, Feb. 22, 2010
