Bianca Jagger's Remarks at the 2003 AIUSA Annual General Meeting

at the Andy Warhol Museum

Many thanks Bill for your kind words; I am a long admirer of your leadership and unwavering commitment to human rights and civil liberties.

Let me begin by saying that it is a great pleasure and a privilege to be with you tonight in this magnificent museum dedicated to the work of my dear friend Andy Warhol.

More than fifty years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its vision of universal freedoms, 111 countries have abolished the death penalty in law and practice.

Ironically, the United State is the only western democracy that continuous to execute its citizens in the 21st century.

Our powerful information age, our scientific advances and newfound knowledge have not led us to eliminate many of the fundamental abuses that have plagued humanity for centuries

And regrettably, it has not led us to abolish the death penalty, one of the most egregious violations of human rights carried out by a state.

Albert Camus once said, "We are not so mad as to think that we shall create a world in which murder will not occur.We are fighting for a world in which state sanction murder will no longer be legal." Today 38 States in this country continues to kill its own citizens.

State sanction murder continues to be legal in this country, in direct violation of international law.

This weekend, we are challenged to Imagine… a world that respect human rights…. Imagine a world were people throughout the world live in peace.

Tonight, I ask you - Imagine a world with no death penalty. A world, in which governments refuse to participate in the horrific act of extinguishing even one human life. Imagine a world in which murder will never be legal.

This is an opportune time to be an abolitionist, as we are seeing the tide turn against executions and the scales tip in our favor.

During 2002, 14 countries limited the use of capital punishment or abolished it outright. Every member of the Council of Europe has abolished the death penalty even for wartime offenses.

In this country 107 people have been exonerated from their death sentences, 9 in the last 16 months.

Thanks to the good work of innocence projects, journalists, dedicated lawyers and Amnesty International activists like you, these 107 exonerated people are living examples of the flaws in our capital punishment system.

But we cannot stop here - our work has only begun. For we must promote the right to life not only for the innocent but also for the guilty.

We in the United States know that working to abolish the death penalty is no easy task, but we must not forget the victories and progress we have made collectively to abolish this outdated mode of retribution.

As a result of the efforts of Amnesty activists and other abolitionists, we have recently seen the American people began to focus on the injustices in the death penalty system. The evidence continues to stack up. Juries are responding:

For the first time in a decade, juries in California's conservative Orange County did not send a single defendant to death row last year.

While Orange County juries have a history of siding with prosecutors in death penalty cases, each of the four capital convictions sought in 2002 resulted in a deadlocked jury.

State governors are often the final stop for death row inmates. The power of clemency is given to governors as a fail-safe against innocent people being executed and to prevent miscarriages of justice. Governors are responding:

In the last 12 months, four Governors have used their powers of clemency to commute more than 150 death sentences to life.

Most specifically, Governor George Ryan of Illinois spent three years examining a death penalty system he found to be riddled with inequalities and injustice.

On January 11, 2003, he commuted the sentences of all 167 death row inmates in his state. He called out the flawed process that led to these sentences. This courageous action to commute the sentences of all death row inmates is another domino to fall in the movement toward ending capital punishment in the United States.

Amnesty activists were among those on the front lines in Illinois drawing attention to the inherent flaws in a system that is fundamentally too flawed to fix.

I myself have had a life changing experience in Illinois. Seven years ago I was contacted by Amnesty International to file a clemency petition for a woman on death row.

And in 1996, I made a personal plea to Governor Edgar of Illinois to grant clemency to Guinevere Garcia; she had initially appealed her death sentence but later waived her right to further appeals because the Illinois Supreme Court upheld her death sentence.

I made a commitment to campaign with Amnesty to save her life despite her wishes to be executed, given her history, her psychiatric condition, and the fact that she was living under Death Row conditions, I believed that she was not able to freely consent to her execution.

The issue was not whether Guinevere's wish should be granted, but whether the State of Illinois was justified in carrying out her execution..

Guinevere history is tragic and I can only provide you with small glimpse of her life experiences.

Her self-medication with alcohol began when her uncle would give her shots of whiskey before raping her at age six. At the age of fourteen, she was gang-raped by five teenage boys.

The boys were arrested but none was convicted. At sixteen, her grandfather gave written consent for her to be married to an illegal alien, Simon Faladassa. He gave her $1500 at the time of the marriage.

Within a year, Guinevere was working as a stripper and prostitute. Her behavior is all too typical of abused children; no self esteem, self-destructive, and sexually promiscuous.

On September 18, 1976, at the age of seventeen, she bore a child. Shortly after her daughter was born, her grandmother sought custody of the baby.

She claimed Guinevere was an unsuitable mother due to her heavy drinking and recent arrest for prostitution. Guinevere became terrified. How would she protect her baby? She drank herself into oblivion. When she regained consciousness, she found her daughter dead in her arms; she had suffocated her while she was drunk.

In 1983, four years after the death of her child, Guinevere Garcia pled guilty to Sara's murder, She expressed tearful remorse at the sentencing, and she served ten years in prison for the crime.

During this period, she married and divorced George Garcia, a former prostitution client. George was physically abusive of Guinevere; he had cut her vaginal cavity with a broken bottle, Within a month after Guinevere's release, she left Garcia when he assaulted her.

About a month later, Guinevere went to her husband's home to get money from him after she was unable to get money out of an automated teller machine.

The evidence indicated that she intended to use a gun only to get money from him.

However, an argument immediately ensued during the course of which there was allegedly a struggle for the gun.

Guinevere then shot her husband at pointblank range once in the chest.

Governor Jim Edgar did grant clemency to Guinevere. He stated that Guinevere's case was "not the kind of case I had in mind when I voted as a legislator to restore the death penalty and acted as Governor to expand it. It also is not the kind of case that typically results in a death sentence in Illinois."

Governor Edgar also noted that Guinevere had expressed her wish to let the execution go forward, however, he stated that "it is not the state's responsibility to carry out the wishes of a defendant.

It is the state's responsibility to assure that the death penalty continues to be administered properly."

After Governor Edgar commuted her death sentence, Guinevere's attorney said that Guinevere was grateful to the governor.

"She said, 'Thank God this has happened,'" and her attorney stated that "You could tell that a weight had been lifted from her shoulders."

A week before Governor Edgar granted clemency to Guinevere, Illinois legislators proposed legislation that would prevent anyone other than an individual with the express written consent of the person who is sentenced to death, from attempting to delay executions.

This legislation has since been passed in Illinois.

Scientific developments in DNA use and testing continue to highlight cracks in the system.

As new advancements in DNA testing emerge, challenges to court proceedings and allegations of legal misconduct arise;

death rows across the country are losing tenants. Legislators are responding:

Across the country state legislatures are considering legislation to abolish the death penalty, reform state statutes, provide access to DNA testing and impose a temporary halt on state killing machines.

Amnesty International volunteers continue to fight for the passage of life saving legislation.

Legal challenges to the death penalty continue to mount, and judges are responding:

In the landmark case, Atkins v. Virginia, the US Supreme Court found that executing persons with mental retardation is cruel and unusual.

A punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Twenty US states that execute those with mental retardation must now comply with the US Supreme Court's decision.

This decision provides the US criminal justice system with a critical tool to uphold human rights standards.

Last summer, US District Judge Rakoff declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional.

This is just another chink in the armor of those who argue that state-sanctioned killings can be fairly administered.

Judge Rakoff questioned the assumption from an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling that it was "highly unlikely that an executed person would subsequently be discovered to be innocent."

From the US Supreme Court to Federal courtrooms to State legislatures, questions about the death penalty are penetrating the public psyche and will greatly influence the future of capital punishment.

Yet, despite these advancements, the movement in the US still faces particular challenges, to name just a few:

In the face of a worldwide trend towards the abolition of the death penalty, the US continues to assert that the execution of its citizens is not a violation of international law, and we continue to march our citizens to the chamber of death without a second thought.

The death penalty is fundamentally racially and economically biased. Since 1977, the overwhelming majority of death row defendants (over 80%) have been executed for killing white victims, although African-Americans make up about half of all homicide victims.

The death penalty is arbitrary. State studies continue to identify disparities in the use of the death penalty such as geography, race of the victims, and gender.

As one of a dwindling number of countries that even allows for the imposition of the death penalty, the United States continues to violate countless international standards and covenants with each execution.

The death penalty continues to hold the US back from its potential as a human rights leader.

The US and Iran are the only countries still sentencing juveniles to death. The execution of juvenile offenders flagrantly violates international law, which demands protection for minors against the death penalty.

This prohibition, respected in nearly every corner of the globe, stems from recognition of hope, a recognition that a young person exhibits immaturity, impulsiveness, vulnerability to peer pressure, and the capacity to change. It is recognition of our responsibility to our future and its leaders.

Since 1990, the US has executed 19 juvenile offenders; in fact yesterday Oklahoma executed Scott Hain.

This compared to 14 in the entire rest of the world combined, 11 of those 19 occurred in Texas alone. In TX, if you are under 18 you cannot buy alcohol, tobacco, serve on a jury but you can be executed.

Similarly, in Louisiana, a person under 18 isn't permitted to WITNESS an execution, but may be executed. The irony of American "justice"!

As one of our very own Supreme Court Justices recently stated, the juvenile death penalty is "inconsistent with evolving standards of decency…and we should put an end to this shameful practice."

Why is it that in almost every other country the standards of decency have already evolved? And not in this country?

Reform measures save lives, but we must not settle for anything less than abolition!

DNA testing provides advocates a powerful investigative and evidentiary tool for police and prosecutors and it retroactively vindicates some wrongly convicted individuals.

But we know that not all crimes leave testable materials, nor are samples always adequately maintained. DNA testing can never serve as a surefire stopgap.

It offers, rather, a window on the system's performance, and the view through that window has not been pretty.

Moratoria provide breathing space and stop the killing for a short time, but we know that there are no reforms that can ever fix the death penalty and we must stay steadfast in our fight!
No system in which fallible human beings decide the fate of other human beings can be free from some degree of arbitrariness and error.

State by state, statute by statute the death penalty is starting to fall. Our efforts are paying off. Some of the most egregious flaws are found right here in Pennsylvania,

legislators are still struggling to comply with the Supreme Court's ruling on mental retardation.

A recent report by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court called for a statewide moratorium, citing race and gender bias.

And here, in Pennsylvania, juvenile offenders are still eligible for death sentences.

Local activists are poised to press for the imposition of a statewide moratorium on executions in addition to gearing up for an initiative to ban the execution of juvenile offenders in Pennsylvania.

Today we lay down a marker; we stake our claim for justice And we demand an end to this atrocity.

Those of you in the abolitionist community know that it is difficult struggle with many challenges but we are in for the long haul - that we speak truth to power and that the truth shall win out.

In the spirit of the Imagine theme this weekend, I am reminded of a few words that Frank Baum once said:

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization.

Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.

Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.

I ask you again, to imagine a world with no death penalty…Imagine a world that respects human rights… Imagine a world in which unconditional love will have the final word in reality.

Our world is shaped by the choices you and I make, the movements we embrace and the death penalty is ultimately about us - it is about you and me and what we want the world we live in and the world we raise our children in, to be.

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