Former inmate looks for reform

Shuhaa Graham, a former death row inmate, offered his experience as it related to capital punishment and penal system reform on Thursday in Transitions.

He was accompanied by Jack Payden-Travers from Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, who spoke on the current political issues and figureheads involved with Graham’s search for death penalty abolition.

Graham said in his earlier years he experienced racism and violence because he is black. He was raised in Louisiana, a segregated society, where his incarcerated grandfather was poisoned; his family moved to Los Angeles where three of his brothers were killed in the Bloods/Crypts gang wars. Graham also had an uncle working as a police officer who was shot and killed, again, because of his family’s race. The majority of Graham’s childhood friends are either dead or imprisoned today.

In his speech he said no one responsible for any of these tragedies had ever received the death penalty. Growing up in L.A., Graham fell under the influences of the Black Panther movement, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. In 1969 he went to jail at age 19 for robbery charges. In 1973 he was framed for the murder of a prison guard and sentenced to death; it took four trials and another eight years to be acquitted. Six of those years he spent in isolation for his political activism.

"As I lived in that cell, and I thought about life I made a decision I would never treat anyone as I had been treated," Graham said. By the end of his lecture, Graham was hugging weeping audience members.

"Let us look at each other foremost as human beings," he said, "Other people’s culture is not a failed attempt at being you, it is but another manifestation of the human experience."

Junior Margot Stagg attended the lectures and said, "the most touching aspect is his positive mentality. It is incredible after all he’s been through Shuhaa still works to further humanity."

Graham said he also supported rehabilitation. "Forgiveness is not an occasional act, but a state of mind," he said. "Let us process it and continue to grow as a civilized nation."

The second panelist, Payden-Travers, wore a shirt that said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" and began his lecture with statistics on death penalty records. Payden-Travers said with over 1,300 executions, Virginia has sent more people to death row than any other state; 21 of those executions were juveniles.

Like Graham, Payden-Travers also drew attention to the plight of minorities’ oppression in the American penal system. According to his statistics, 19 of the 21 juveniles put to death were minorities. He also explained Virginia offers death row inmates two options; electrocution or lethal injection. If the inmate does not choose, the default option is lethal injection. Payden-Travers said the chemical used in this injection has been banned for veterinarians since 2002, as it was deemed too painful to use on cats and dogs.

"We have to ask ourselves what is wrong with this nation —we have the worst statistics in the history of the human race in terms of per capita imprisonment in a time of peace," Payden-Tavers said. "We have more people under lock and key than any other society in world history."