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From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Peter Linebaugh wrote to me about your case. While I can understand the pressures on you to take such a decision, I cannot say how strongly I hope that you will change your mind.
Peter is absolutely right to say that your decision will influence much more than the feelings of the relatives of those who you killed. It will influence the whole debate about capital punishment and therefore the chances of others avoiding execution, some of whom will have committed no crime.
You say in your letter to your friends and correspondents that you would ‘like to expose these people for who they are in the hopes that it will help prevent them from hiding the truth and manipulating the outcome of someone else’s trial’.
I think you are mistaken in this argument. In this country the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire family have shown that years of campaigning can force the judges and the political establishment to back down. A host of other cases – the Cardiff Three, the trials of those arrested in the anti-poll tax riot, the case of the Taylor sisters wrongly accused of murder, those accused of killing a policeman during the Broadwater Farm riots – have all had success.
In your country many of these people would have been dead many years ago, executed by the state. Any act which helps those who want to keep or extend the death penalty endangers the lives of people like these and many others.
That is why you must not give up the fight, even though you are guilty. You cannot bring the women you killed back to life, but you can play a part in saving the lives of those who the state will execute if the pro death penalty lobby gains in strength. Many of those the state will execute will be as innocent as the Birmingham Six or the Taylor sisters in this country. Please stay alive to play your part in saving their lives.
John Rees is editor of International Socialism.
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