August 18, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
This capitalist system in the U.S. has no future for millions of Black and Latino youth—that is, no "viable" way to exploit them. In this situation, a "New Jim Crow" has arisen, featuring a drumbeat of demonization, a relentless school-to-prison pipeline, pervasive police harassment and brutality, and massive systematic incarceration of Black and Latino people. This New Jim Crow has a logic: the logic of genocide, which is the extermination of a whole people. Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party and of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, has described what we have now as a slow genocide that could turn into a fast genocide. Stigmatization... containment... extermination. This has happened before. And this must be STOPPED. The following is a regular feature showing just some of what goes on week-in, week-out in this offensive by the system.
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The Case of Duane Buck
It's 2013—more than 50 years since the end of Jim Crow. But a man in America can be executed because he is Black.
In 1997, Duane Buck was convicted of murdering two people in Harris County, Texas. The jury then had to decide whether to sentence Buck to life in prison or the death penalty.
To give a death sentence in Texas, there has to be evidence the person will pose a danger in the future. And the prosecutor had a psychologist testify that race made Buck more likely to be violent in the future. The prosecutor asked the psychologist, "You have determined that the sex factor, that a male is more violent than a female because that's just the way it is, and that the race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons; is that correct?"
The psychologist answered, "Yes." The jury accepted the prosecutor's recommendation. And Duane Buck was sentenced to death.
A new study reveals that between 1992 and 1999, when this trial took place, the Harris County District Attorney's office was over three times more likely to seek the death penalty against African-American defendants than against white defendants; and Harris County juries were more than twice as likely to impose death sentences on African-American defendants. (University of Maryland professor Ray Paternoster)
In September 2011, Duane Buck was scheduled to be executed. Buck had already eaten his "last meal" when he was granted a last-minute reprieve by the U.S. Supreme Court. Over 50,000 people from Texas and around the country have signed a petition calling on Texas officials to grant Buck a new sentencing hearing. Meanwhile, Duane Buck remains on death row.
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