By Barry Sheppard
Last September, Anthony Porter was scheduled to die. He had been on death row since 1983, and his time had come. Today he is free. His case is another in a growing list that demonstrates how the death penalty in the US comes down disproportionately against working-class people, especially blacks.
Porter is alive only because a professor of journalism, David Protess, at Northwestern University in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, assigned his students to investigate his alleged crime.
Porter's lawyer had heard of Protess, who has encouraged his students before to look into death penalty cases. Three years ago, his class played a leading role in freeing four men wrongly accused of a 1978 gang rape and double murder.
When Porter's lawyer first contacted Protess last September, the professor was unable to help because the autumn school semester had not yet started. Porter was scheduled to be murdered by the state on September 25, three days before the start of classes.
Porter was then granted a stay of execution so that his lawyer could present evidence that Porter, who is retarded, was not mentally competent enough to be put to death. This delay allowed Protess to assign his students to look into the case.
They not only found evidence that Porter was framed by the police, but also recorded a confession by the real killer. The main witness against Porter told the student sleuths that he had seen Porter in the vicinity of the crime, but that he did not see him fire the fatal shots. He also said that the real killer held the pistol in his left hand. Porter is right-handed.
In a sworn affidavit, the witness said he was "threatened, harassed and intimidated" by the cops into pinning the crime on Porter.
Protess said he accepted the case for his class because there seemed to be "evidence of innocence", specifically an assertion by the mother of one of the victims that she believed Porter was not guilty because she had last seen her daughter leave for the park where she was killed in the company of the man who now has confessed to the crime.
Porter is the 10th person scheduled to die to be released in Illinois since the death penalty was reinstated there in 1977 — out of a total of 23 death row prisoners! In Florida, 18 people have been released since that state reintroduced the death penalty in 1973.
One in 27 people executed in the US is later proven to be innocent.
Early this year, the state of Oklahoma killed Sean Sellers for a crime he committed when he was 16. He was the 10th juvenile offender executed in the US in this decade, more than in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Iran combined — the only other countries that are known to execute child offenders. Sellers had a multiple-personality disorder as a result of a brain injury he suffered as a child, a fact the jury that convicted him was unaware of.
Last November at Northwestern University, 23 of the 73 men and two women who have been released from death row since 1972 told their stories at a public meeting.
Black artist Dennis Williams was on death row for 17 years. "Had the state of Illinois gotten its way, I'd be dead today", Williams said.
That statement floated through the hall 23 times. Walter McMillian, released after six years on death row in Alabama, recounted how he lost his logging business and his marriage. Sonia Jacobs went to prison as a wife and mother — when she was released she was a widow and a grandmother.
You can imagine the damage done to these people, not only because of the time lost in their lives, but as a result of spending that time with the knowledge of their impending doom a constant horror.
The death penalty is a barbaric relic in any case. That it has been reinstated in the United States is a measure of how "civilised" this country is. But when the bias against the poor and minorities that is part and parcel of the system of "justice" in the US is factored in, the criminal nature of that barbaric relic is compounded and magnified.