Our Latino community should work to end the death penalty | Opinion
We live in a country where our criminal justice system is defined by the size of your wallet and the color of your skin. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the death penalty.
Latino communities everywhere should be concerned about the role that financial well-being and race can play in justice. Those two factors alone should motivate us to add our significant influence to the momentum to end capital punishment. We will not be alone: 13 states have either ended the death penalty entirely or shut down its operation, via a moratorium on executions, over the past 15 years. Plus, another twelve states ended their death penalty statutes before 1975.
A new resource from Equal Justice USA was created to provide our Spanish-speaking communities with the in-depth information needed to see how unjust this part of the legal system is, documenting the particular impacts on Latinos in the United States.
No issue challenges a person’s support of the death penalty quite like innocence. At least 172 people have been sent to death row over the past 40 plus years only to later be exonerated of the crime. At least two of them — both from Florida — could not speak English at the time of their conviction.
Clemente Aguirre was one of them, when Seminole County sentenced him to die for two murders he did not commit. DNA evidence would help to prove him innocent, but only years after police officers refused to have it tested or presented — and after he spent 15 years in prison.
Mr. Aguirre understands that he was an easy target. His skin is brown, he wasn’t documented to be in the country, he worked as a laborer and couldn’t afford a good attorney, and he couldn’t even read the papers police officers tried to force him to sign.
To see the role racial bias plays into who gets a death sentence, one need not look any further than the history and terror that was invoked through lynchings in America. These lynchings were the preferred “death penalty” sentence used by both vigilante groups and state-sponsored actors as a tool to inflict terror. This was especially true for the Latino community in the Southwest, a parallel to the racial terrorizing of the Black community in the South.
Florida must always account for its legacy in this history of terror. Research has found 317 reported lynchings in the state, one of the highest totals in the country.
Although lynchings eventually became less common, the practice was then replaced with more state-sponsored racial terror in the form of our criminal justice system. The application of the death penalty may have evolved from a noose to a syringe, but that does not lessen the terror that Latino communities associate with state-sanctioned death.
And Florida plays an even bigger role in the modern-day version of lynching. Today, the state has the largest active death row in the nation, at 346. From 2010-15, just 16 counties across the country delivered five or more death sentences. Four of those counties are in Florida.
Given those figures, perhaps it’s not surprising that Florida leads in another despicable statistic: exonerations. Florida courts have sentenced 30 people to die, only to determine later that they were innocent. No other state even comes close. Do you have any doubt that there are more innocent people on death row?
One of the most tragic elements of this awful system is understanding the backgrounds of those who have committed terrible harm. Because of the strenuous legal process around the death penalty, courts and lawyers collect enormous amounts of information about those convicted. Each year, the Death Penalty Information Center distills that information. In 2019, 22 were executed. Nineteen of them suffered from serious mental illness, some type of brain impairment, substantial childhood trauma, or a combination of the three. We failed these people. We didn’t see their trauma, their hardships, and therefore didn’t intervene before it led to violence.
For these reasons and many more, it’s clear that the death penalty is the most extreme and egregious response to violence. Approval of the death penalty is at an all-time low, with 60 percent in the U.S. saying they prefer alternatives, the latest indicator of a 25-year trend against the death penalty.
It’s no longer a question of if we should have the death penalty. Now, it’s when will we finally get rid of it? Latino communities have an opportunity to help write the last chapter in this sordid history.
Magdaleno Rose-Avila is an author, journalist, and human rights activist with 35 years working for non-violence and abolition of the death penalty.
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