After calls for clemency are rejected in Texas, state executes Quintin Jones
https://themilitant.com/2021/05/29/after-calls-for-clemency-are-rejected-in-texas-state-executes-quintin-jones/
BY JANET POST
Vol. 85/No. 22
June 7, 2021
May 18 protest at governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas, urging state
grant Quintin Jones, inset, clemency, life in prison. Capitalist rulers
use death penalty to intimidate working people.
May 18 protest at governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas, urging state
grant Quintin Jones, inset, clemency, life in prison. Capitalist rulers
use death penalty to intimidate working people.
Quintin Jones, a 41-year-old African American, was executed at the Texas
State Penitentiary in Huntsville May 19. After 20 years on death row, he
was given a lethal dose of pentobarbital, which attacks the brain and
central nervous system and is used to euthanize animals.
Appeals against the execution went all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court, whose denial came less than 30 minutes before Jones was executed.
His petition for clemency and life in prison was rejected by the state’s
parole board, a decision Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declined to reconsider.
Jones was sentenced to death in 2001 for killing his 83-year-old
great-aunt, Berthena Bryant, with a baseball bat in Fort Worth in 1999.
Michael Mowla was the attorney representing Jones in his attempts to
have the death penalty set aside. Jones had a long history of heavy
alcohol and drug abuse — including cocaine and heroin — that started
when he was 12 and suffered traumatic physical and sexual abuse as a
child. These factors were not considered in his trial or sentencing.
Jones’ case was similar to that of Thomas Whitaker, a Caucasian prisoner
sentenced to death for killing his mother and brother. In 2018 the
governor had commuted Whitaker’s sentence to life in prison. Mowla filed
a civil rights suit saying Jones’ clemency plea was turned down because
he was Black. This was rejected.
Several members of Jones’ family pled for clemency, including his aunt’s
sister, Mattie Long. “Because I was so close to Bert, her death hurt me
a lot. Even so, God is merciful,” Long wrote in an affidavit. “Quintin
can’t bring her back. I can’t bring her back. I am writing this to ask
you to please spare Quintin’s life.”
Since capital punishment resumed in 1982, Texas authorities have
executed 571 persons, including more than 50 since Abbott took office in
2015.
In the execution chamber, Jones said his final words into a microphone
hanging over the gurney he was strapped onto: “I would like to thank all
of the supporting people who helped me over the years. I was so glad to
leave this world a better, more positive place.”
“I became a man on death row. So now you’re killing the man and not the
child,” Jones had said in a video appeal to Gov. Abbott. “Being in death
row for 20 years, you’re around death a lot.”
For the first time since executions resumed in Texas, Jones’ killing was
not witnessed by the media. The Associated Press and Huntsville Item
reporters on site weren’t informed or escorted to the execution chamber
due to a “miscommunication,” prison officials said.
A demonstration of a couple dozen took place for hours outside the
Huntsville prison walls, and was shown live on Death Penalty Action’s
website. The evening before, a rally and prayer vigil were held outside
the governor’s mansion and the State Capitol in Austin. A petition was
delivered calling for “Clemency for Quin” with more than 170,000 signatures.
Among the demonstrators were family members of Rodney Reed, who has been
on death row in Texas for over 20 years, one of 202 people on the
state’s death row. Four more executions are scheduled there in 2021.
Rulers debate how to execute
For the last few years, as drug companies have stopped making chemicals
used in executions, the rulers have been scrambling to find new drug
cocktails or other methods to put people to death. Last November the
Justice Department changed its execution protocols to allow firing
squads, electrocution and poison gas if state governments decide to use
them.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed legislation this month saying
death row inmates must choose between the electric chair or a firing
squad if lethal drugs are unavailable. Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah
also allow firing squad executions.
Only 9% of people in the U.S. think a firing squad is humane, reported a
USA Today poll. In 2019 a Gallup poll reported that a majority of people
— 60% to 36% — think life imprisonment should be the maximum sentence
for murder.
“Despite proclamations and posturing by Democratic and Republican
capitalist politicians, including President Joseph Biden, who backed the
death penalty for decades but says he has changed his mind, working
people continue to be sent to the death chamber,” Gerardo Sánchez,
Socialist Workers Party candidate for Dallas City Council, said in a
statement to the press.
“Executions are a brutal tool of punishment meted out to the working
class by the ruling class to intimidate us and try and deter us from
fighting against their dog-eat-dog capitalist system,” Sánchez said. “We
need to break from the political parties of the rulers and form our own
party, a labor party, to organize working people and our allies to take
political power into our own hands. Workers and farmers will then tear
down the whole capitalist criminal ‘justice’ system with its cops,
courts and barbaric death penalty, and replace them with revolutionary
combatants.”
Protest: ‘Charge cops who shot Andrew Brown’
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Protesters took to the streets in Elizabeth City May
18, just hours after Pasquotank County District Attorney Andrew Womble
announced he had ruled that the shooting death of Andrew Brown Jr. by
sheriff’s deputies there was “tragic,…
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After calls for clemency are rejected in Texas, state executes Quintin Jones
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--
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept