Freedom Socialist • Vol. 28, No. 5 • October-November 2007Kenneth Foster: “I’m coming off death row!”A grass-roots movement has saved the life of Kenneth Foster Jr. (Haramia Ki Nassar). Just six hours before this African American man’s scheduled execution on Aug. 30, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 6-1 for clemency and the governor commuted Foster’s sentence to life imprisonment. This was an incredible victory in a state where 400 executions have taken place since capital punishment was reinstated in 1982. Family members and supporters who were gathering in Huntsville, Texas, to protest Foster’s state-sanctioned killing instead held a euphoric celebration. Foster’s death sentence was particularly outrageous because it was retaliation for a murder that the courts never claimed he committed. According to the prosecution, Foster, then 19, was the driver in an August 1996 robbery spree in which two of his three passengers held up four people. On the way home, Mauriceo Brown left the car and got into an altercation that ended in the shooting death of Michael LaHood, a white man and son of a prominent lawyer. Foster was in the car, 80 feet away, when the gunfire occurred. But under the Texas “Law of Parties,” Foster’s mere presence made him a co-conspirator and just as responsible as the man who pulled the trigger. (Brown was found guilty of murder and executed last year.) When Foster’s execution date was announced in May 2007, family members and anti-death penalty activists organized weekly meetings and held ever-larger rallies and marches in Austin and San Antonio. Their work attracted media attention that brought the injustice to the eyes of the world. Editorials in major Texas papers opposed the sentence. Five thousand people wrote letters to the governor, the Board of Pardons, and state lawmakers. Prestigious figures, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and ex-president Jimmy Carter, called for clemency. Foster will now be moved from the dreaded Polunsky Death Row Unit, where last year a dozen inmates went on hunger strikes to protest conditions. He and his supporters vow to win his release. “It seems like 10 years on death row under 23-hour lockdown could amount to time served for any crime that Kenneth ever committed,” said Dana Cloud of the Save Kenneth Foster campaign. Donations for Foster’s defense are still needed. Send checks payable to “To Save Kenneth Foster,” to Velocity Credit Union, P.O. Box 1089, Austin, TX 78767. Read updates, statements, articles and poetry by Foster and other prison activists involved with the DRIVE (Death Row Inner-communalist Vanguard Engagement) Movement at www.drivemovement.org. —H.G. |
 Return
to Index page for this issue
 Return
to Freedom Socialist newspaper main page
 Return
to FSP homepage.
|