Club Profile

The Left Files

Campaign to End the Death Penalty

By Matthew Vasquez
From the April 2006 Print Edition

The Campaign to End the Death Penalty seeks, as the name clearly states, to end the practice of the death penalty in the United States. The Berkeley chapter of CEDP is part of the Chicago-based national campaign. With only 22 chapters in various states, CEDP has nine chapters in California alone.

The CEDP has active been in Berkeley for at least four years, according to sophomore Rachel Pringle, a prominent member in the campaign. This past year, the campaign received $350 from the ASUC. In addition, the campaign occasionally receives funds from private donations and raffles off death penalty–related literature and death row inmate art.

Club efforts include raising awareness about and activism against the death penalty. Among these efforts, CEDP has held “Live from Death Row events where [CEDP] has a death row inmate on speakerphone and they tell their experience with the death penalty system,” according to Alice Chamberlain, another prominent member of CEDP. Currently, CEDP meets every week in 287 Dwinelle at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays. CEDP also tables daily on Sproul between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., where it sells the New Abolitionist, the bimonthly newsletter for the campaign, for 50 cents a copy.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, more than 150 people filled the First Congregational Church of Berkeley in support of death row inmate Kevin Cooper in January of 2004. The event organized by the Berkeley Chapter of CEDP the day after Governor Schwarzenegger denied his request for clemency, featured a call by Cooper, which was made audible over the church’s loudspeaker. Cooper, who was convicted in 1983 for murdering four people, two of them children ages 10 and 11, asserted his innocence during this call.

In December 2005, the members of CEDP visited the San Quentin State Penitentiary to attend a vigil and protest in support of Stanley “Tookie” Williams. According to Pringle, the vigil was “jam-packed with people from all different backgrounds.” Berkeley sophomore and CEDP member Trisha Chakrabarti was a speaker at this event. The vigil was one of many that CEDP members have attended in the past.

More recently, on February 28, the Campaign to End the Death Penalty held a discussion panel, in which five speakers discussed their encounters with the death penalty. The event, co-sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International, aimed to highlight the injustices of the death penalty. Speakers included Bill Babbit, an anti–death penalty activist whose brother was executed by the State of California, and Greg Wilhoit, an exonerated death row inmate from Oklahoma. Wilhoit discussed the humanity of death row inmates and how they are not the monsters that most people perceive them to be. In addition, public defender Michael Ogul talked about the vengeful and “lawless” nature of the death penalty.

Throughout the week of March 13-17, CEDP held Death Penalty Awareness Week on upper Sproul. According to Alice Chamberlain, this week was aimed at raising awareness about the problems with the death penalty, and getting people to think about whether or not they want the state killing people. Each day of the week, members handed out flyers featuring the five main reasons that the campaign opposes the death penalty. Their reasons are that it kills innocent people, it is a form of cruel and unusual punishment, it is racist, it targets the poor, and it is not a deterrent to crime. The Web site, nodeathpenalty.org, offers facts to support each of their claims against the death penalty.

However, these facts are misleading. In support of its claim that the death penalty is racist, the Web site offers the fact that a black person who kills a white person is 19 times more likely to receive the death penalty than a white person who kills a black person, but it does not mention how it obtained this statistic. It also offers the statistic that although African-Americans are only 13 percent of the population, they constitute 43 percent of prisoners on death row. Of course, the Web site fails to mention the statistic offered by the Bureau of Justice that shows 52.1 percent of all homicides in the US between 1976 and 2002 were committed by African-Americans.

While the club officially holds these five reasons for opposing the death penalty, members join for various reasons, according to Rachel Pringle. “Our only requirement is that you are against the death penalty,” she commented. In expressing her own views on the death penalty, she said, “I am against the death penalty because that I have no right to take the life of another human being. I believe in teaching by example, and the death penalty does the opposite.” Fellow member Alice Chamberlain said, “There are so many problems with the criminal justice system that the death penalty is barely ever executed fairly. We don’t need to get tough on crime but tough on the causes of crime.”

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