Abe Bonowitz
On an overcast day this past January, eighteen people stood on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court and unfurled a banner that read "STOP EXECUTIONS!"
For that nonviolent act, all those involved were arrested under a law that makes it a crime to "parade, stand or move in processions or assemblages" or to display a "flag, banner or device designed or adapted to bring into public notice a party, organization or movement" on the marble plaza and steps of Supreme Court building.
This week, twelve of those eighteen went on trial in a case presided over by D.C. Superior Court Judge Robert Salerno. On Thursday, June 29, 2017, all twelve were convicted. The outcome was expected, says Abe Bonowitz, co-director of Death Penalty Action and one of the twelve. (The other six accepted plea agreements because they were unable to appear at the trial.)
The January 17 action and this week’s trial were the latest events in what has become an every-five-year ritual by a resurgent movement to abolish the death penalty — a movement that has brought together religious activists, the wrongly convicted, and two groups of families: the loved ones of murder victims whose killers face execution, and the loved ones of people executed or facing execution for capital crimes.
"There is ongoing opposition to execution, and we’re not going away.”
“We want to make it clear that there is ongoing opposition to execution, and that we’re not going away,” Bonowitz told The Progressive Thursday night after the trial had concluded.
January 17 marked the 40th anniversary of the first execution after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Since 1997, death penalty abolitionists have staged similar protests in front of the court building every five years: in 2002, 2007, 2012, and again this year.
One goal has been to challenge laws that shield the court from protests on the steps and plaza: As Shane Claiborne, the Philadelphia-based Christian writer and one of the twelve who stood trial this week, told The Progressive in April, the arrests and charges were tantamount to "saying that your First Amendment ends on the property of the Supreme Court."
But, Claiborne added, "Our deepest concern is to use our trial to put the death penalty on trial."
Bonowitz and his co-defendants—they’ve come to call themselves the D.C. 12—believe they were able to accomplish that goal this week. Indeed, the judge granted them considerable latitude to argue against the death penalty as part of their defense.
"Our deepest concern is to use our trial to put the death penalty on trial."
“This was really the first time that we were able to put the death penalty on trial in a courtroom—even though it was obviously us who were on trial,” Bonowitz said Thursday night. Four of the twelve took the stand and “conveyed the failings of the system and, most importantly, the collateral damage from the death penalty and what it does to the families of the people involved—or in the case of Derrick, the person who was wrongly convicted.”
Derrick Jameson spent twenty years in prison in Ohio, seventeen of them on death row, before being exonerated of the murder he never committed. He testified, Bonowitz said, to “the damage that still affects him today.”
Another to testify was Randy Gardner, whose brother, Ronnie Lee Gardner of Utah, was the last person in the United States to be executed by firing squad. “Randy was able to introduce into evidence a photograph of his brother's corpse on the autopsy table,” Bonowitz said. “It was shocking...to see what a firing squad does to the body. He testified as to the damage and the long term impact to his family and himself.”
Defendant SueZann Bosler of Florida brought the perspective of crime victims to the trial. Bosler’s father, Rev. Billy Bosler, was killed by an assailant who stabbed him twenty-two times and who also stabbed her five times, and left her for dead. After she recovered, she kept faith with her father’s opposition to the death penalty, successfully campaigning for her attacker to be spared execution and instead serve life in prison. In a statement that was part of a collection posted after the January arrest, she wrote of the attacker: "James Bernard Campbell has the title 'murderer,' but if I were to help the government kill him I would be a 'murderer' too.”
Among their defenses, the protesters also cited a claim of necessity: Attorney Rob Lee testified on their behalf this week that by their actions on January 17, they had hoped to persuade the court to set aside the execution of Lee’s client, Ricky Gray, the next day in Virginia. Gray’s execution went ahead as scheduled. While a federal prosecutor suggested that they could have simply filed an amicus brief, the protesters viewed the situation differently, Bonowitz said Thursday night: “This was a living amicus brief that we filed in going personally to the Supreme Court.”
In his closing statement to the court before sentencing on Thursday, another of the twelve, Art Laffin of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi USA, spoke of the 1999 death of his brother, Paul, killed by a mentally ill homeless man.
"The best way I know how to honor my brother is to work for the prevention of violence, not to replicate it," Laffin told Salerno. "It’s not a crime to be part of a group that opposes state-sanctioned killing..... On January 17 we converged at the Supreme Court as individuals from different walks of life to convey with many others a message: state-sponsored homicide is unjust, immoral and must end!"
When the time came to sentence them, Judge Salerno rejected prosecution calls for varied punishments that could have included jail time for some, consideration of past convictions, and potentially four-figure fines. Instead he agreed to the defense plea for a uniform sentence and time served—the thirty hours they had spent last January in the D.C. lockup after their arrests. All will also pay a mandatory fee of $200 each for the D.C. Courts’ Crime Victims Compensation Fund.
Thursday night began an annual four-day vigil, fast, and teach-in on the death penalty organized by the Abolitionist Action Committee, which helped organize the January 17 protest. Participants are hoping they might yet persuade Virginia’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe to stop another execution: that of William Morva, a mentally ill man scheduled to be put to death July 6.
Will the action that led to this week’s trial repeat in five years? “Maybe, if need be,” said the 50-year-old Bonowitz, who took part in the first demonstration in 1997.
“We do this civil disobedience because when they tell us where the marble starts and free speech ends, that's an affront to our citizenship in a place like the United States where we're supposed to have freedom to address grievances with the government.”
Paraphrasing his own remarks made to the judge earlier in the day, Bonowitz said Thursday night, “We do this civil disobedience because when we come to the United States Supreme Court and they tell us where the marble starts and free speech ends, that's an affront to our citizenship in a place like the United States, where we're supposed to have freedom of expression and freedom to address grievances with the government.”
Bonowitz added, “It’s my goal to get our message up as close as possible to the words that are carved into...this building, which are ‘Equal Justice Under Law.’”