Repeal

The Urban League of Portland has joined forces with scores of other Oregon organizations, advocating for the replacement of the death penalty with life without parole.

On Nov. 6th California voters rejected Proposition 34 and an opportunity to replace their death penalty with life with no possibility of parole. In spite of the facts that the Golden State holds 22% of the nation’s death row inmates (725) and has had only 13 executions since 1967 (none since 2006) and most death row inmates die of old age, after decades of taxpayer-financed appeals, in a close vote the death penalty stays as a part of their constitution.

Sister Helen Prejean, anti-death penalty advocate and author of Dead Man Walking, talks about Oregon's death row and the death penalty in general. In 1982, at the suggestion of a civil rights activist, Sister Helen Prejean wrote a letter to a man on Louisiana’s death row. Her correspondence with Patrick Sonnier, convicted of the murders of two teenagers, would lead Prejean into a life of challenging the death penalty and the morality of a legal system skewed against minorities and the poor.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

In April, Connecticut became the fifth state in five years to abolish the death penalty. In Oregon this past December, Gov. John Kitzhaber placed a moratorium on all executions, citing his refusal “to be a part of this compromised and inequitable system any longer.”

That public response to Kitzhaber’s action has been relatively mute perhaps indicates that the time has come for Oregon to join Connecticut and 16 other states in abolishing capital punishment.