USA | Activists speak out against upcoming executions

“The federal death penalty and the death penalty in this country are at a state of injustice and they have been since their inception. The death penalty itself is, simply put, a bad public policy – morally, economically, socially and legally,” said Abraham Bonowitz, co-director of Death Penalty Action, a national organization mobilizing opposition to federal executions.

“These executions have been scheduled not because it's time, but because it's the political season and the president wants to have an execution under his belt as he gets into the campaign and the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention.”

The government has scheduled executions by lethal injection for Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, with inmate Daniel Lee Lewis scheduled for execution on Monday.

The Wednesday execution is currently on hold. Another execution is set for August.

The federal government's death row is at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, and it has the federal system's only functioning execution chamber.

The protest group gathered Monday afternoon at the north end of the prison complex.

Bonowitz said the decision to have the executions during the COVID-19 pandemic endangers many people as attorneys, federal officials, victim family members, chaplains, inmate family members and protesters will be brought together in a facility that is known to have cases of COVID-19 among inmates and staff.

Sister Barbara Battista, justice promoter for the Sisters of Providence at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, said there is no moral foundation for adding violence on top of violence by executing people already serving prison sentences for their crimes.

Sylvester Edwards of the Terre Haute branch of NAACP said the executions violate civil rights and human rights and disproportionately affect people of color on death row.

Juries have declared the prisoners guilty, Edwards said, and no one is trying to set those individuals free.

Arthur Feinsod, president of the Interfaith Council of the Wabash Valley, said people of great conscience and religious belief have spoken out for decades that the death penalty is immoral and unjust.

During the statements, a Bureau of Prisons employee approached the protest group to ask them to leave the BOP grounds on the west side of the busy highway.

Media representatives moved across the road while the protesters continued to make statements from the edge of the highway blacktop. Additional prison officials soon arrived at the scene in multiple vehicles, but observed the protesters from a distance.

Death penalty resistance groups have been planning protests since before the executions were first scheduled for December 2019.

Instead of mass protests nationwide in a time of COVID-19, virtual protests and petitions are being promoted instead of the mass protests. Bonowitz asked protesters to stay safe and meet in small vigil groups, but not to come to the prison area on execution days.

Bonowitz said the Bureau of Prison is providing a bus to transport protesters to designated areas on the prison grounds, but the local resistance group does not plan to be in those areas.

Karen Burkhart, coordinator of the Indiana State Death Penalty Abolition group, said the security area around the prison property is larger than for past executions, and for the first time includes security on the Wabash River at the prison's western boundary.

Local law enforcement and other agencies met with prison officials on Monday as part of the planning for the executions. The 1st execution was originally scheduled for Monday morning, but has now been pushed back to about 4 p.m.

Source: Tribune-Star, Staff, July 7, 2020

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
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