CITIES AGAINST
DEATH PENALTY
By Cati Romero
Dominique Jerome Green
E xecuted October 26, 2004
" There were a lot of people that got me to this point and I can't thank them all. But thank you for your love and support. They have allowed me to do a lot more than I could have on my own ... I have overcome a lot. I am not angry but I am disappointed that I was denied justice. But I am happy that I was afforded you all as family and friends. I love you all. Please just keep the struggle going … I am just sorry and I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be. But I guess it only hurts for a little while. You are all my family. Please keep my memory alive. "
- Last Words-
Last November 30th the book Cities Against Death Penalty was presented in Rome, in charge of the Community of Saint Egidi, institution that picks up the restlessness of many citizens of all the world -the cities adhered to the initiative are at present 181-, regarding the absurdity that supposes the legal validity of the death penalty in contemporary states. Mario Marazziti, responsible of the Community of Saint Egidi in Rome , manifested in press conference:
” Wanting to fight against the death with the death is not legitimated, and what is worse is that the one who applies death penalty is the state, the maximum application ”
In this sense part, it is particularly bleeding -for the chronological proximity- the case of Dominique Green, executed the past October 26 th in the United States of America . Dominique Green was executed at 7.59 p.m., even though unexpected hopes for the reprieve asked by a federal judge, then unfortunately rejected by Texas authorities and the U.S. Supreme Court. The Saint Egidi Community has been always beside him through his legal struggle and constantly prayed for him. Dominique was thirty years old. The day before his execution he had met, among others, the son of the victim, whose murder he was accused, who has been repeatedly asking these last days for sparing Dominique's life. Before dying, Dominique expressed all his gratitude and love to the Community.
In USA , a recent Gallup Poll measuring public opinion regarding death penalty revealed a decline in support for capital punishment. The poll found that 66% of Americans support death penalty for those convicted of murder, down 5% from an earlier 2004 poll and significantly lower than the increase of 80% in 1994. In an analysis of Gallup polls on this question from 2001 to 2004, women were more likely to oppose to death penalty than men. Among African-American respondents, 49% opposed the death penalty and 44% were in favour of it. Catholics were less supportive of death penalty than Protestants. ( Gallup Poll Analysis, November 16, 2004).
As colophon to this article, we will mention the cruelty individual words that mean the application of death sentence pronounced by the disappeared writer and existentialist philosopher Albert Camus:
” An execution is not simply the death. It is as different to the deprivation of the life as a concentration camp is it of a prison. It converts the death into a law, in a public premeditation known by the future victim, in an organization that is in itself premeditated of assassination, which no criminal act can be compared with, however calculated it looks. So that there was an equivalent, death sentence should punish a criminal who had told his victim of the date on which a horrible death would provoke him and who, since that moment, had kept it confined for months to his favour. A monster like this is not in the real life ”