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News :: Prisons |
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Organizer on death row to be executed |
Current rating: 0 |
by Walidah Imarisha
Email: walidahi (nospam) hotmail.com (verified) |
12 Apr 2006
Modified: 04:58:20 PM |
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Hasan Shakur has organized concerts, organizations, events and put out newsletters from a death row cell dealing with liberation of black people and all people. Now the state of Texas has set his execute date for April 27, to silence his voice. |
Working with the Human Rights Coalition, a prisoner family organizing project headquartered out of Philadelphia, I have had the amazing opportunity and honor to meet Hasan Shakur, aka Derrick Frazier ##999284.
Hasan sits on the advisory council, the governing board of HRC. He also sits on Texas’ death row, and has been there for all of his adult life.
As I got to know Hasan, I was blown away by the work and commitment this brotha did. From a cell in one of Texas' most notorious units, without access to phone calls or human contact, he has been able to organize fundraising concerts to stop violence in the communities on the outside. He is able to put out a newsletter about prison issues more consistently than most organizations in the "free" world are able to. He was able to found a chapter of the Human Rights Coalition
and recruit young committed focused brothas in prison.
I constantly nag him when I write because he sleeps 3 or 4 hours a nigh. He spends the rest of it working, connecting, planning, organizing, reading, educating, growing. When I admonish him that he needs to rest and take care of himself, he writes back saying, "I have too much to do and I don't know how much time I have left."
And now the state is saying that Hasan's time is up. It is saying that just like Tookie Williams or Shaka Sankofa, it does not care about innocence. It does not care that Hasan was barely older than a teenager when the state decried he should die. It does not care that he was represented by ineffective counsel who was later disbarred, who did nothing to rebut the state’s case against him, to prove his character and show any mitigating circumstances.
The state says that it does not care that Hasan is an invaluable asset to the community, that, like Tookie, he serves as an inspiration and a shining beacon of hope for other young brothas who would want to escape a life that leads to prison. The state says that in fact, Hasan, just like Tookie and Shaka, are dangerous because they inspire hope, because they let people know that even in the most hellish of conditions, there can be dignity and redemption and love. The state can not tolerate love in its manufactured land of death.
So the state has said that Hasan will die. The state says April 27, 2006, they will strap Hasan down to a gurney and inject his veins with poison and take away another innocent person who is striving under the most abusive soul murdering conditions to make the world a better place.
And I am tired. I am heartsore. I am enraged. How many more will there be? How many more of our people must we sacrifice before it is too much?
Please write and call the governor and ask for a stay of execution. Go to Hasan's website www.hasanshakur.com. Sign the petition to save his life at http://www.PetitionOnline.com/frazier. Donate money for his attorney, so that they can continue to file in the courts to prove Hasan's innocence. Find out more about his case, and the amazing work that this brotha is accomplishing under the most impossible of conditions, where he wakes up to see them cutting down a brotha from his cell because of suicide, where the tier runs red with another inmate's blood, where he can not touch his child's face.
Hasan has committed his entire adult life to making the world a better place. It's time that the world repaid the favor.
SAMPLE LETTER
Office of the Governor
P.O. Box 12428
Austin, Texas 78711-2428
April 4, 2006
Dear Governor Perry,
Derrick Frazier #999284, an inmate at the Polunsky Unit in Livinston, Texas, is scheduled to be executed on April 27th. I and many others strongly believe that this would be a gross miscarriage of justice, and I urge you with all my heart to grant Mr. Frazier a stay of execution.
There are some serious doubts that Mr. Frazier committed the crime. There is a lack of material evidence to link him to the crime for which he is sentenced to die. He did not get to confer with legal counsel when he was sentenced, and received counsel during his trial by a lawyer that was later disbarred. There are serious questions about the circumstances under which his “confession” took place.
There are enough questions in his case to raise doubts that this man committed a capital crime. To execute him with those doubts out there would be a travesty.
I implore you to grant a stay of execution to Mr. Frazier, and allow him the time and space to prove his innocence.
Sincerely, |
See also:
http://www.hasanshakur.com
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No Place to be Reborn: The Awakening
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This work is in the public domain |
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A Picture's Worth: A Poem for Hasan Shakur |
by Walidah imarisha
walidahi (nospam) hotmail.com (verified) |
Current rating: 0
12 Apr 2006
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Click on image for a larger version
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Overexposed photos
Show you only the outside:
In front of the steel grating
Of a Texas prison visiting cage
Tall and solid
Dark eyes
Stare out of dark skin
Arms clasped
As in prayer
And contemplation
In front of a barrel of a chest
Face of stone
Because death row
Does not cultivate
Laughter.
He
Painted in prison colors
Branded with an image
Burned into the public’s vision
By racism
And too many episodes of
COPS.
But you have not seen
Him when
His child comes to visit
And a smile splits his face
As he presses his hand eagerly
Against the bullet proof plexiglass,
Hoping to feel
Some warmth
Leak through.
There are no pictures
To capture
The prison suicides he has seen,
Bodies hanging from sheets
That just yesterday
Was a breathing human being.
We have no snapshots
Of the tiers
Crying blood
Of inmates
Who were kissed
Too deeply by guard batons.
There is no image
That can sum up
Watching your friend
Be escorted in shackles
Toward the hot stinking pant
Of death.
If we could open his chest,
We could flash shutters at
A warrior’s heart
Pumping struggle and determination,
Fueling organizations
Headed from the cell
The size of a bathroom,
Organizing concerts
To stop violence
While every minute
Is an assault.
We would capture
A mind constantly on the prowl,
Head of a lion,
Proud untamed ready to protect
Its cubs
Ready to fight for its family.
He sleeps three hours a night
Because there is too much work to do
And he knows
Better than anyone
We are never promised tomorrow.
But sometimes
Photos
Are more than burning flesh
And broken mirrors.
They can press truth
Tightly between glass
Lock it in
So you can not deny
The stark existence of reality.
Because you can see,
If you look closely,
The shy tentative half smile
Of the child he was,
The serious intense gaze,
Young eyes who saw too much of the world
And yet still trusted
There was some good
Left in it. |
See also:
http://www.hasanshakur.com
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