\chapter[The long march of African Americans]{United States, the uncomplete dream. The long march of African Americans}

\chapterauthor{Robert Pac}


What happened to Martin Luther King's dream that he was talking about in August 1963, in Washington, in front of 250,000 black and white people neck and neck?
The dream of a multicolored America finally free of racism, poverty and exploitation...

Today, 35 years later, his dream is still not realized and African-Americans are in an even worse situation than in 1963, worse than before the Civil Rights Act snatched in 1964.

The struggles of African-Americans for the recovery of their civil rights lasted more than 40 years to end with a victory, at least in the texts, around 1970, thanks to the action, unfortunately too often disorderly, of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, the lawyers of the NAACP, the white and black liberals and the radicals of the Democratic Party.

After the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King in 1968, on which the shadow of the FBI looms, ruthless repression almost completely destroyed the revolt of African-Americans and other minorities in the 70s.
It was a veritable covert war against domestic dissent waged by the FBI and the CIA as part of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), a covert but massive offensive against left-wing organizations and groups, the Communist Party, peace movements, blacks, students, and other democratic forces.
The aim of this programme was to “unmask, dismember, destabilize, discredit or neutralize”, killing them, the leaders, members or sympathizers of these groups if necessary.
The implementation of this plan, led by FBI Director Hoover, who declared the Black Panthers to be “the greatest threat to national security,” resulted from September 1968 to December 1969 in the killing by police of 14 Panther leaders and the imprisonment of hundreds of activists, some of whom are still in prison and threatened with ending their lives there.

Although officially abandoned for 20 years, this program continues to be implemented, as evidenced by the persecutions that continue today against Leonard Peltier, the Indian leader of the American Indian Movement, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976 and against Mumia Abu Jamal, black journalist, former spokesman for the Philadelphia Black Panthers, sentenced to death in 1982,  victims of both of a coup set up by the FBI and a trial marred by numerous irregularities.

Today, there are no more large national and structured black organizations, no more charismatic leaders, no more large mass movements.

\section{A victory called into question}


Since the 70s, the benefit of hard-won legislation, officially intended to end racial exclusion, has been nullified by a government strategy of physical encirclement and economic isolation leading to a real decadence of social life in the ghettos.

This strategy, inaugurated by Ronald Reagan in 1980, and continued by his successors Bush and Clinton, has severely cut budgets for welfare, education, health, housing construction and urban renewal.
African-Americans have borne massive costs of this dismantling. 35\% of black families are now below the poverty line (compared to 6\% of white families).
On average, the income of a black family is 58\% of that of a white family, a lower figure than in 1967!

The official unemployment rate for African-Americans is twice the national average rate, the method of which is questionable (5.5\%!).
In reality, that of blacks must be around 25\%.

For Black youth aged 16 to 19, the rate is 57\%. In 1967, it was 26.5\%! Today, in Harlem, 75\% of young people are unemployed.
Further intensifying the war on the poor, Reagan cut the duration of unemployment relief in half: 13 weeks instead of 26.

Life expectancy for a black man is 69 years compared to 76 for a white man. The infant mortality rate among blacks is 16.5 per thousand compared to 8.1 for whites.

The poorest, hundreds of thousands of families, are gradually being deprived of social assistance without which they cannot survive;
such as the welfare allowances or the “food stamps” created by Kennedy in 1961 and which still exist.
Thus, it is estimated that 12 million children in the United States do not absorb the minimum amount of calories needed.
By depriving the federal government of the necessary funds, the Reagan-Bush administration withdrew the management of welfare from the central authority.
Thus, it is extraordinary to note that today in the United States, health, retirement, childcare, education, downtown renovation and social housing are a private matter in the hands of trusts (Corporate welfare).

Finally, in recent years there has been a purely racist offensive.
Thus, blacks, who have always been overexploited, who have always constituted a sub-proletariat on which the wealth of white finance was built, are designated today as the cause of America's difficulties.
The meagre allowances that some receive to survive are presented as laziness bonuses that we like to consider congenital among blacks.
The government relies on this racist propaganda to justify programs to gradually eliminate the gains of civil rights.
Thus, it is almost the end of “busing” and school integration or “affirmative action” which was intended to ensure equal opportunities in education and employment for victims of discrimination of yesterday and today.


\section{A policy of genocide}

“Every year, our economy produces more and more products and services with fewer and fewer people.
The hard, unskilled work—the work that no one wanted, the work that tolerated blacks in America, the kind of work that we niggers have always done—is rapidly disappearing.
Even in the South, mississippi for example, more than 95 percent of cotton is picked by a machine.
Today, black labor is no longer profitable, or even sought after, the American economy no longer needs it. ”
This is how actor and activist Ossie Davis spoke in the preface to \emph{We charge génocide} in 1970 (International Publishers Co. Inc.).

The new, well-paid jobs are not easily accessible to African-Americans because, on the whole, they have a low level of education and degrees.

Many black sociologists and activists see government policy toward African-Americans as a genocidal desire to keep the number of black population at a certain financially acceptable level, eliminating what U.S. leaders call a “population surplus.”

The example of recent decades shows that this solution has been accepted and implemented: that of limited genocide.

The weapons of this genocide, in addition to misery, hunger, the break-up of families, unemployment, are social confinement (ghettos) and the introduction into black communities of drugs and AIDS.
Plus the elimination of a large part of the black population by the American judicial and penitentiary system.


\section{Ghettos: an American-style apartheid}


The black question in the United States is the result of a centuries-old policy of exclusion in its economic, cultural, ideological, social and political aspects.
The current strategy of sidelining African-Americans could only result in American-style “apartheid.”
There is no question, of course, of parking blacks in “townships” surrounded by barbed wire as in South Africa at the time of apartheid.
But these "townships" nevertheless exist in the very center of the major cities of the United States: they are the “downtowns”, the ghettos, which can be surrounded and gridded in a few hours by the police and the army.
The ghettos are now abandoned to African-Americans by the rich and petty white bourgeois who can sleep soundly in their pretty cottages in the polished and self-defended suburbs.

The lockdown since 1972 has achieved what slavery and segregation had not been able to achieve completely, that is, the surveillance, without watchtowers or barbed wire, of 97\% of black Americans.

The ghetto was cut off from the official economy and the rest of society.
Habitat degradation is compounded by high crime, high mortality rates, poor social and educational structures and chronic unemployment.
It is a micro-society apart, a closed world with specific structures and language.
Violence, family dislocation (56.2\% of families are headed by a single woman), alcoholism, drugs lead to inertia or despair that leads to suicidal revolts.

The confinement of African-Americans in ghettos falls under Article II, § C of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified by the United States, which states:
“In this Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
[...] Article II C: Intentional subjection of the group to conditions of existence which should lead to its total or partial physical destruction”.

Almost all black families in the ghetto survive only through welfare, public aid, which is an essential factor in the break-up of black families, as well as an instrument of oppression.
With “”welfare”, “one becomes the slave of the worst kind, the slave who demands chains”.

And hunger often reigns in these destitute households. How do you live on three dollars a day when a burger costs two?
There is no social security coverage in the United States. Social budgets, already cut by the Reagan administration, were further cut by his successors, Bush and Clinton.
Harlem, for example, is the place in the world where crime is the highest. Delinquency flourishes there, because survival in the ghetto is a daily struggle.
It kills six times more than in the rest of New York or Chicago. And, for most of these crimes, the motives or perpetrators will never be known.
Black men are seven times more likely to be murdered than a white man. A black man living in Harlem is less likely to reach age 65 than a bangladeshi resident.
“According to studies, you have less sleep, you are more likely to be obese and to have hypertension. This is not only due to poverty.
Your shortest and most painful life is, to a large extent, the anxieties caused by being black in America. ”\footnote{Andrew Hacker in \emph{Two Nations, Charles Scribner’s Son}. Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1992.}
Regarding the Los Angeles riots of April 1992, 1 New York Times editorial of May 7, 1992 states that “the Los Angeles fires illuminate with a harsh and new light the way America draws a line under certain places ...
Worse still, America is drawing a line under people: a generation of young black people.”

On a project for a so-called “reform” of social assistance in the early 80s:

\begin{quote}
\enquote{This is not a welfare reform, it's a plan to turn ghettos into vast cemeteries — because there is no work.
The aim of this legislation is to ensure that entire layers of minorities die, because this decrepit capitalist system no longer needs it.}\end{quote}\footnote{Genocide USA, \emph{Workers Vanguard} n° 463, 21 octobre 1988.}


\section{Drugs}


Drugs have always been in the hands of the white man an important instrument of his oppression of men of other races.
The best known example is the import into China of opium from India which was to provoke the famous “opium war” (1839-1842) between England and China whose government wanted to ban opium trafficking.
With China defeated, England's rule was facilitated by a corrupt regime and, above all, by the organized poisoning of an entire people by drugs.

Poisoning is the term used by Ho Chi Minh (then Nguyen ai Quoc) in 1925, in his clandestine book \emph{Le procès de la colonisation française} (The Trial of French Colonization) in which he denounced the French policy in Indochina which imposed on every Indochinese a significant consumption of alcohol and opium.

This method of annihilating the will to revolt among the colonized was of general use among the colonizers.
It was particularly widely used by the conquerors of North America against the Amerindians.
It was the famous “fire water” well known to western lovers, which, added to the massacres and diseases imported by “civilization”, precipitated the demise of the Indians.
The weapon of drugs is still used today against those colonized inside their metropolis that are the blacks of the United States.
In the past, marijuana first, opium, morphine, heroin and cocaine were tolerated among blacks, or at least repression was done in such a way as not to destroy the general level of trafficking.

Today, Harlem, for example, has eight times more drug addicts than the rest of the New York metropolitan area.
Currently, 40\% of drug-related crimes. For cocaine and heroin, African-Americans in Harlem substituted “crack”, this cheap derivative of cocaine with violent and immediate effects.

This drug, which acts on the brain, produces euphoria followed by depression, irritability, anxiety and paranoid psychosis.
Then come pulmonary emphysema and an overdose can cause a heart attack, an increase in heart rate and blood pressure;
the addict has hallucinations, he has the impression that his body is traversed by an army of insects. There is also anorexia and considerable weight loss. Eventually comes death.

Drugs are everywhere in the ghettos. The rapid increase in the supply of “crack” caused the price of the sachet to fall from \$40 in 1988 to a price of between \$3 and \$10 today.
This decline has led to an influx of consumers with low livelihoods. In addition, this trafficked cocaine, consumable without a syringe, keeps away the fear of AIDS.
In New York State, more than one-third of crack users are African-Americans, although they make up only 14.6\% of the state's total population.

African-Americans account for 50\% of the estimated 1.2 million people who inject drugs inject drugs, of whom about 300,000 have AIDS.
In the state of Georgia, African-American males account for 8 in 10 (79\%) of cases attributable solely to intravenous drug use.
While they account for 43\% of all AIDS cases in Detroit, they accounted for 76\% of all AIDS cases due to intravenous drug use in April 1987.

African-Americans make up a disproportionate percentage (27\%) of all AIDS cases recorded by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta.

African-American and Hispanic children make up approximately 80\% of all children infected with the AIDS virus in the United States.

Two-thirds of all black AIDS cases are concentrated in New York, New Jersey and Florida. Blacks are three times more likely to contract AIDS than whites.

The miserable living conditions of blacks and also the lack of immune defenses of blacks with AIDS, explain the current rapid spread of tuberculosis in the ghettos.



\section{cocaine babies}


One in five black children born in the ghetto today is a drug addict. He is even before he is born.
It becomes so during pregnancy, in the womb of its mother who takes drugs, using “crack” most often.
“Drug addiction has direct and multiple effects on pregnancy. One in ten children born in Harlem is underweight than average.
At the maternity ward of the Grand Hospital in Harlem, out of 3,000 thousand births, the rate of drugged infants is 15\%. They are called “cocaine babies.”
Two months premature, they weigh 600 grams less than other children at this stage and are three times more likely to die in their early years.
In the same institution, the rate of miscarriages is twice as high as the average.” \footnote{\emph{L’Humanité}, February 22 1990.}

\begin{quote}
\enquote{Crack damages the developing fetus much more than heroin or other hard drugs.}
\end{quote}\footnote{\emph{New York Post}, May 9 , 1990.}

The “cocaine baby” that escapes infant mortality will suffer throughout its short life from the direct and multiple effects of drug addiction on pregnancy:
epilepsy, paralysis, malformations, motor and mental delays, feverish agitation, incommunicability...

“Cocaine babies” are 15 times more likely than other children to be victims of “sudden death”. But, for them, death may be the best thing. 
For many “cocaine babies” who survive, their first experience in life is the agony caused by the “withdrawal” of cocaine. They suffer horribly.
They are so sensitive that they cannot be handled or fed normally. They stir their limbs endlessly, looking for relief.
Even the most hardened of medical specialists cannot bear the intolerable screams of these babies.
“Never in my medical career have I seen such suffering as cocaine,” the director of maternity at General Hospital in the District of Columbia told the Wall Street Journal.” \footnote{\emph{International Herald Tribune}, July 29/30 1981.}


\emph{The genocide} 

The drug spread like an epidemic in black American ghettos. Is this trivialization the effect of chance?
To this question put to three members of the Detroit City Council, infamous for its ghettos, the following answers were given:
“It is a capitalist industry and a means of psychological action.” “Drugs are first and foremost a source of money.
But it was introduced into the black community to fight the Civil Rights movement. It is a new form of slavery, as in the last century, alcohol among the Indians. 
It must be noted that, if it also wreaks havoc on whites, it remains better controlled.”
After discussing the social causes of drug addiction, a third local elected official adds: “... But we must not forget that drugs keep the people quiet. ”\footnote{Quoted in \emph{L’Humanité}, November 8 1988.}

Remarks by Leonard McNeil of the American Friends Service Committee collected at a conference on crack cocaine at the Tenderloin District of San Francisco on April 27, 1990 and reported by Recovering Issue 18, June 1990:
“But “crack”, added to the short life expectancy among black men, the high infant mortality rate, the disproportionate percentage of blacks incarcerated or killed by the police, the homeless, the unemployed, life in the midst of toxic waste, AIDS and the lack of health facilities clearly show a deliberate offensive against minorities.”

During the same conference, Daniel Sheehan of the Christic Institute developed the theory that a market for crack was intentionally created by the U.S. government to secure profits by controlling the manufacture and importation of drugs.
These profits are used to finance illegal operations such as the supply of arms to the contras (of Nicaragua).

\begin{quote}
\enquote{The fact that African-Americans have become the target of the 'war on drugs' and are essentially condemned for this problem, is part of a strategy to blame the victims,” Sheehan says, “in order to ward off suspicion from the real culprits:
suppliers and members of government who are trying to disintegrate minority communities and perhaps even destroy them.}
\end{quote}

“I'm scared. We will jeopardize the future of an entire generation of people who will not be able to find their place in society and become productive members,” says Dr. Sterling Williams, Director of the Department of Obstetrics at Harlem Hospital.\footnote{\emph{New York Post}, May 9 1990}

The federal government estimates that by the year 2000, there could be between 1 and 4 million children exposed to crack cocaine in the United States.
And that at least 100,000 would live in the five neighborhoods of New York City \footnote{\emph{New York Post}, May 8  1990.}.

An April 21, 1990 article in the Oakland Tribune shows unambiguously that the war on drugs has become a war against the African-American community.\footnote{\emph{Peoples Daily World}, May 3 1990.}
In August 1996, the Californian San Jose Mercury News published a resounding investigation by a reporter of the newspaper, Gary Webb, accusing the CIA of being at the origin, during the 80s, of the introduction of “crack”, the “cocaine of the poor”, in the black ghettos of American cities. 
Titled “Dark Alliance” and quickly circulated on the newspaper's website, the investigation accused Nicaraguan drug traffickers of having put on the market, in Los Angeles, large quantities of “crack” to finance, in cahoots with the CIA, the resistance of the “contras” to the Sandinista regime.
It had caused considerable emotion in the black community and led to the opening of an internal CIA investigation.

This reaction of the CIA had an immediate result quite predictable. The management of the San Jose Mercury News launched a counter-investigation at the end of which the daily admitted to having accused the CIA without evidence.
But Jerry Ceppos, the editor, wrote:
“ ... Although drug traffickers did have ties to CIA-paid “contra” leaders, and although Webb believes that relations with the CIA were very close, I don't believe we have evidence that senior CIA officials were aware of these relationships.” (!)

Despite this (spontaneous?) about-face of the San Jose Mercury News, we see, as many African-American sociologists and activists believe, that the trade in “crack”, cocaine and heroin, like AIDS, are all elements of a secret and unspeakable conspiracy on the part of the government and the CIA to exterminate a large part of the black population.


\section{police brutalities}


The Murder by Miami Police officers of Arthur McDuffy, a black insurance agent guilty of burning a red light on his motorcycle in 1979;
the beating filmed by a Rodney King fan, another black man, in Los Angeles in March 1991;
the despicable martyrdom inflicted on a Haitian resident, beaten and sodomized with a suction cup handle in the premises of the 70th District police station in Brooklyn, which sparked a scandal and even riots for the first two cases, are only the tip of the iceberg.

In a country where the general opinion considers that being of African origin is already a crime, the entire black community is considered to be “predisposed to crime” and the criminal justice system is focused not on reducing crime, but on arresting, convicting an ever-increasing number of “criminals”.

The Philadelphia newspaper Inquirer investigated police brutality during interrogations:
“ ... one technique was to cover the suspect's head with a phone book and then hammer him with a heavy object.
But on other occasions, officers beat suspects with lead pipes, batons, American fists, handcuffs, chairs and table legs.
Sometimes other suspects were forced to watch the brutality through the mirrors and the police officers told them that they would suffer the same fate if they did not cooperate with the police. ”

Murder is usually used without provocation and very frequently. Murder is most often justified by claiming that the police were attacked by the victim and therefore fired in self-defence.
To a journalist for the French daily Le Matin, a police officer from the 28th sector in Harlem said: “When you kill someone, the case is closed directly.” \footnote{Le Matin, supplément, December 29/30 1979.}.

From 1968 to the present, the judicial system has been systematically used to justify assassinations committed by law enforcement and law enforcement agencies against members of minorities.
Let us recall just a few examples:

More than 30 activists of the Black Panther Party were murdered by the police or by individuals who acted at the instigation of the police, as has since been proven.
All of these murders, which required legal justification, were classified as “justified homicide” (including the murder of Fred Hampton who was shot in the head at close range while he was sleeping).

The many black students killed during protests, such as in Orangebourg State, South Carolina in 1968 (three students killed), Jackson State, Mississippi in 1970 (two students killed) and Southern University in Louisiana in 1972 (two students killed).

The objectives of the government's programme cannot be mistaken when looking at the anti-ghetto weapons supplied to police departments across the country.

The P.38 revolver was replaced in many sectors by the super-powerful Magnum P.357. These pistols are capable of passing through the engine block of an automobile.
This means that the use of this weapon in urban areas can easily cause many victims, the same projectile can pass through the bodies of several people in line.

\begin{quote}
\enquote{New York City police officers will begin changing their P.38-caliber revolvers to 9-caliber semi-automatic pistols this fall.
This decision reflects a change in the position of the Department, which had previously refused to use more powerful and faster weapons.} \end{quote} \footnote{International Herald Tribune, August 23 1993.}.

The standard equipment of many patrol cars features the 12-gauge riot rifle that can fire dum-dum bullets as well as chevrotines
(each cartridge contains a charge of 9 pellets the size of a P.32 caliber projectile)\footnote{Center for Research on Criminal Justice, Berkeley, California, The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove.}.

These rifles are called “riot control” because their 45-centimeter barrel allows them to cover a wide angle of fire, killing or wounding indifferently.

With such weapons, and in the repressive context of the American political system, it is not surprising that every year more than 600 people, men, women and children, between the ages of 10 and 81, are killed by the police.

45 to 55 percent of those killed by police are African-Americans. In Chicago and Philadelphia, more than 70 percent of those killed by police are black.


\section{Justice and prisons}


\begin{quote}
\enquote{These are your creations, uncle: chains and sticks. You created them four hundred years ago and you use them to this day.
You created them. But they represent only a fraction of your barbarity, my uncle. You used the tree and the rope to hang it.
You used the knife to chastise him while he struggled with the rope to catch his breath.
You used fire to make it squirm even more, because hanging and castration were not enough fun for you.
Then you used something else — another of your creations — this thing you called the law.
It was written by you and for you and those of your kind, and any man who was not of your kind had to violate it sooner or later...} \end{quote} \footnote{In \emph{Par la petite porte}(by the little door), by Ernest J. Gaines, Liana Levi Éditeur, 1996.}.

The fruit of a long history, American racism does not lie only in the minds of whites, it is institutionalized in all the workings of American society.
And particularly in the criminal justice system. The most obvious sign of this racism is the racial composition of this system.
In a country where 20\% of citizens are of non-European origin, the criminal justice system is composed of 95\% of people of European origin.

\begin{quote}
\enquote{In the most usual case, the black person suspected of having committed a crime is arrested by a white police officer, presented to a white judge, a white prosecutor and a white jury, in a court whose proceedings are recorded by white clerks.
The usual place of the black in this judicial system in the hands of the whites is the box of the accused.
Such a situation convinces him that justice is an instrument of oppression in the hands of whites and that this situation can only influence the application of justice.
This can only result in discrimination in prosecution and convictions.
And even when whites acting in the justice system have no land biases, the cultural and class barriers that stand between them and the defendants invariably place the latter at a disadvantage.} \end{quote}\footnote{Lennox Hinds, \emph{in Illusion of Justice}, University of Iowa, 1978.}

As a result of this racist justice, nearly half (48\%) of the 1,630,940 people who inhabit penitentiaries, state and municipal prisons are African-Americans, while they represent only 12\% of the population.
The same proportion of blacks are among the 3,350 death row inmates currently on “death row.”
Blacks are imprisoned in the United States much more than in South Africa during the apartheid era: 3,109 per 100,000 compared to 729 in South Africa \footnote{Sentencing Project 1991.}.

UA study of this situation shows that there is no relationship between the delinquency rate of blacks (even if it is high) and the rate of their imprisonment, nor is there a relationship with the proportion of blacks living in a state.
On a general level, we discover that the doubling of the prison rate observed over the past five years in the United States has nothing to do with crime, which has not increased in the same proportions (it has even decreased in the last two years according to the triumphant reports of the Department of Justice).
In 1996, the imprisonment rate for blacks was 800 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to 114 for whites, meaning that a black person is seven times more likely to go to prison than a white person. In Illinois, for example, it's ten times.

It is also instructive to compare prison rates around the world.
According to the latest available figures, it can be seen that in the United States, the rate of white imprisonment is similar to that recorded in most Western European countries.
But, incredibly, blacks in the United States go to jail more often than those in Apartheid South Africa.
In fact, the rate of imprisonment of blacks in the United States is the highest in the world.

The police arrest blacks seven times more often and black women eleven times more often.

Indicts them seven and twelve times more often respectively.

They are sentenced eight to fourteen times more often.

Obtains sentences of deprivation of liberty eight and eighteen times more often.

And has them sentenced to prison ten to fourteen times more often than whites.

An African-American is arrested while a white person would not be arrested in the same circumstances; we ask the black person for a deposit that we know well that he will not be able to pay.
He finds himself in prison, far from his family, without the means to afford a lawyer; he cannot prepare his defence and is forced to accept a court-appointed lawyer who does not even have time to study his case, assuming he intends to do so.
In the most usual case, he is brought before a white judge, a white prosecutor and a white jury and ends up in jail.
The racist justice system will sentence him to a very long sentence for a real or fabricated crime, for which many whites would have been acquitted or sentenced to a much shorter prison term.

A 1979 government study found that one in five black people would go to jail in their lifetime.
This has since worsened, and today this proportion is close to one in four.
The total number of African-Americans in the United States who have gone to prison is about three million, almost the population of Chicago.

In February 1990, a study conducted by the Sentencing Project, a Washington D.C. law association, showed that black delinquency, combined with racism in the U.S. justice system, resulted in one in four young black people between the ages of 20 and 29 behind bars, on parole or on probation.
This study concluded that an entire generation of blacks was at risk of being permanently excluded from working life. A sacrificed generation.

How can we not see in this policy of sidelining the society of African-Americans as an aspect of the implementation of the Genocide limited?

More than half of the deaths of prisoners in the northeastern states of the United States in 1991 were caused by AIDS, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Nationally, 28 per cent of the 1,863 prisoners who died in custody were victims of AIDS.
In New Jersey, 69\% of inmate deaths were AIDS-related, as were 66\% in New York, 44\% in Florida, 33\% in Maryland, and 30\% in North Carolina and Massachusetts \footnote{\emph{International Herald Tribune}, September 14 1993.}.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, reports that AIDS cases are on the rise in U.S. prisons.
5,279 prisoners were infected with AIDS in 1994, or 5.2 cases per 1,000 prisoners, almost six times the rate in the general adult population of 0.9 per 1,000 \footnote{\emph{International Herald Tribune}, April 6/7 1996.}.


\section{ The “ Crime Bill ”}


On 19 November 1993, the Senate adopted a major “Crime Bill” which proposes, inter alia, to extend the scope of the death penalty to more than 60 new crimes.
These include the killing of federal officials, genocide, sabotage resulting in train derailments, the murder of U.S. citizens abroad, and murders committed with a firearm carried beyond state limits.

\begin{quote}
\enquote{This “crime bill,” which also includes a so-called “three tricks and you are out” provision and billions of dollars for prisons and the prison administration, is so draconian that neither Reagan nor Bush could have passed it.
In its essence, the project is a public employment program that mobilizes more than \$30 billion for white workers.
This is a social program if ever there was one and one that reflects the socio-political and economic evolution of the United States.}\end{quote}\footnote{Mumia Abu Jamal in \emph{Live from the Death Row}, Éditions La Découverte, 1996.}.

During the debate on this bill, senators voted by 52 votes to 41 to adjourn consideration of a proposed amendment to prohibit the execution of juvenile offenders.

By its vote of 314 to 111, the House of Representatives followed the Senate's positions on capital punishment.


\section{Baseball and Justice}

In March 1995, Jerry D. Williams, 25, two children, Californian and Black, stole a slice of pepperoni pizza from kids at a Redondo Beach fast food restaurant and was sentenced to 25 years in prison under the three strikes law signed by President Clinton in 1994.

Inspired by a rule of the basic bail game “Three strikes and you're out”, this law stipulates that repeat offenders convicted twice, are liable, during a third appearance before a judge, to a sentence of 25 years in prison to life, without the possibility of parole.
This is the case with Williams.

A slice of pizza is worth 25 years of imprisonment, like a hold-up, like rape, like murder. As one journalist of /emph{L'Humanité} noted:
“The baseball\rfootnote{Base bail in the original, very likely typo so corrected in the translation} determines American jurisprudence, we can fear in the coming years that the convicts will be purely and simply handed over to the circus lions.”


\section{Prison conditions}

Despite the rhetoric of U.S. prison officials extolling the humanity of U.S. prisons, prisoners and their visitors claim that brutality in prisons has never gone away and even taken on a new and often hidden form.

It was this difference of opinion that led the Prisoners Rights Union (PRU) of Sacramento, California, to conduct the Prison Discipline Study (PDS) in 1989, a survey of prisoners themselves.
The result of this study was the subject of a report entitled “The Myth of Humane Imprisonment”.

More than 70 percent of prisoners who responded to this survey said severe physical and psychological brutality was the norm in maximum security prisons in the United States.
Solitary confinement, suppression of “privileges” and physical brutality are the usual practices in most high-security prisons.

\begin{quote}
\enquote{Physical abuse has a beginning and an end, while psychological abuse affects every moment. Even the most hardened are affected by every little detail of these abuses:
a glance, a new schedule, a change of food, a letter delivered late, a visit refused, an observation on the content of the mail.
Details that can have multiple reasons and provoke serious disciplinary action.} \end{quote}

While the practice of solitary confinement is considered appropriate and legal by courts and prison authorities, it is perhaps the most devastating method of psychological abuse.
Although prison officials maintain that the majority of prisoners spend only a few days in solitary confinement, the survey of prisoners reveals that this punishment is most often suffered for years.
Prisoners also point out that solitary confinement is often arbitrary, especially for prisoners suffering from psychiatric disorders.
Many prisoners reported intimidation of visitors, including threats by guards against family members of detainees and sexual harassment of female visitors.

Nearly 40 per cent of the prisoners interviewed saw detainees receiving psychiatric treatment or medication against their will.
32 percent reported incidents of verbal abuse and racial slurs, food spoilage, extortion, “strip” searches, and death threats —including those perpetrated by guards at the Los Angeles County Jail who were members of the Ku Klux Klan.

90\% of the prisoners surveyed confirmed the physical brutality. 70\% of them said they had them at least once a month.
Prison staff use their fists, feet, electric batons, batons, tear gas, fire hoses, electric torches, broom handles, rubber hoses and rifles firing wooden bullets.

About 100 respondents testified that they had witnessed the beating of handcuffed prisoners.
40 had seen guards engage in “body slam” (for example, throwing a prisoner on the floor or against a wall, head forward) with handcuffed prisoners on their backs.
Thirty others had seen “goon squads” at work (for example, a group of guards beating a prisoner, most often handcuffed).

Thirty-five women interviewed testified that they had either been beaten, raped or tied naked on a bed and subjected to the jokes of the guards.
One of them claimed that she had lost her last baby after the guards shot her with their stun guns.

55 prisoners interviewed testified to “concealed” physical abuse.
It is for the guards to provoke fights between prisoners by housing enemy detainees in the same cell or by introducing enemies at the same time in a common place.
The guards call this “dog fights” or “cock fights”.
Detainees are also beaten in their cells or transferred to security facilities to beat them out of the sight of other prisoners.
Other detainees complained of being forced to perform arduous tasks while sick or infirm.

Only 10\% of the detainees interviewed said they had not witnessed such brutality.

The main motivations of prison staff to commit this brutality are their racial and political prejudices.

Political prejudices are the most common. They are exercised against prisoners who fight against injustices and who encourage and help other prisoners to do the same.
Jailhouse lawyers are the most frequent target of prison staff.
"Prison lawyers" help other prisoners, many of whom are illiterate, draft their complaints and appeal procedures against prisons and courts.
As the internal system in all prisons is arbitrary, discriminatory and inconsistent, most prisoners have constant conflicts with the administration and the judiciary.
Because of this, guards and administrators have a usual policy of “isolating” lawyers from prisons.
Finally, 30\% designated "political prisoners" as a target of the prison administration.

The most frequently targeted group after “prison lawyers” is African-Americans. There were frequent complaints of “selective discipline based on racial prejudice.”
There was criticism of the racist nature of the criminal justice system, which throws a disproportionate number of non-white people in jail for longer and harsher sentences (e.g., the death penalty).

Then came the prisoners afflicted with a mental disability.
Placed in an inappropriate environment and without adequate treatment, the mentally handicapped pose problems for the guards, who often find no solution other than in brutality.
Hated by the staff, they are frequently housed with the unstable and agitated as punishment.

On May 3, 1995, journalists, photographers, televisions, were summoned to attend the event by the Republican governor of Alabama:
the return of the convicts, irons at their feet, chained five by five, to work on the side of the roads. A show that we had not seen for thirty years.
The head of the state prison administration, Ron Jones, explains that this measure was taken to save on guard staff and to make the prison so “unpleasant” that offenders will have no desire to return.
“Without the shackles and chains, I need a guard to monitor 28 detainees. With chains, one for 40 is enough.”
Prisoners are entitled to a minimum of thirty days of this special regime:
twelve hours of work a day chained, no radio, no television, no visits, no “canteen”. Florida and Arizona plan to follow Alabama's lead.

This method of making prisons inhumane is spreading: the sheriff of Phoenix, Arizona, has set up the inmates in a rudimentary camp, in the middle of the desert, without the slightest comfort.
In other States, prisoners are being stripped of exercise rooms and television, and reintegration or treatment programmes for sex offenders are being abandoned.
Human rights groups challenge this national trend as “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Constitution.


\section{death penalty}


Racism also plays its role in the application of the death penalty. This is a horrible lottery, Amnesty International said in its 1987 report on the death penalty in the United States. 
A lottery where some have more “chances” than others to “win”. These are the poor, African-Americans and members of other ethnic minorities.

There are now 3,350 death row inmates in the United States waiting for punishment on “death row,” sometimes for more than 10 years, and their number is growing by 250 people every year.
And 48\% of these convicts are blacks who, let us remember, constitute only 12\% of the population.

From 1967 to 1977, there were no executions in the United States, although death sentences continued to be handed down during this period. 
In 1972, the Supreme Court declared the current death penalty law unconstitutional and null and void, based on the fact that most of the laws applied up to that date constituted “cruel and unusual” punishment, in violation of the 8th and 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution. 
In 1976, a moratorium suspending executions for 10 years ended with a Supreme Court ruling that the death penalty was constitutional if it was imposed under certain conditions. 
Since then, 38 States have revised their laws to this effect and reinstated the death penalty. 
Today, 433 prisoners have been executed since 1976 to the end of 1997, including 38 in 1993, 31 in 1994, 56 in 1996, 45 in 1996 and 74 in 1997. 
This means that the pace of executions is accelerating. And this goes in the direction of public opinion acquired to security theories.

The death penalty in the United States is racist, as is the entire American justice system. In its 1987 report on the death penalty in the United States, Amnesty International found that: 
“It appears that blacks convicted of the murder of whites are more often sentenced to death than any other category of person;  on the other hand, whites are rarely sentenced to death for killing blacks. ”
(A former member of the Ku Klux Klan, Henry Francis Hays, who was executed on June 6, 1997, was the first white person executed for the murder of a black man since 1944.) 
It is observed that, as with other penalties, the American justice system establishes an order of gravity where the offenses considered the most serious are those where the aggressors are black and the victims white followed by those of white aggressors and white victims, and, finally, white aggressors and black victims.
 Amnesty International notes in its report: 
“We note that in Florida and Texas, blacks guilty of murdering whites were respectively 5 to 6 times more likely to be sentenced to death than whites who killed other whites. 
In Florida, blacks responsible for murdering whites were 40 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks.” 
Most of the blacks who are on “death row” have been charged with the murder of a white man. 
“Never has a white person been executed for raping a black woman when 54 percent of blacks who raped white women were executed between 1930 and 1967 and 89 percent of the men executed for rape were black.” \footnote{Amnesty International, Report on death penalty 1987.}

Let us add that in the United States, on a general level, the death penalty particularly affects the poor, 60\% of convicts are unemployed at the time of their arrest; 65\% are non-specialty; 
50\% have not completed the 1st cycle studies; 90\% are too poor to afford a lawyer. 
In California, over an eight-year period, 42 percent of workers convicted of first-degree murder were sentenced to death, while for "white-collar" workers, the proportion was 5 percent.

It should be noted that the death penalty has no deterrent power: Canada has abolished the death penalty and the murder rate has decreased in this country; Florida and Texas have reinstated the death penalty and the murder rate has continued to rise. 
A number of psychologists have even advanced the theory that the death penalty actually encourages psychopathic behavior in which a person seeks his or her own death in some sort of self-programmed suicide.

Some recent Supreme Court decisions denying appeals in several death penalty cases have limited the possibilities of appeal and, by the same token, could further accelerate executions in the United States in the future, especially since the President of the Supreme Court, the ultra-reactionary William Rehnquist, placed there by Ronald Reagan, has proposed to Congress a text generalizing these decisions. 
He even supported a proposal by the Special Committee of Judges recommending that death row inmates be granted only one appeal (habeas corpus) to federal courts, after the appeal to the state court was dismissed.

The height of the horror is that in case of error (or error in quotation marks), it is irreversible! 
In November 1985, the American Civil Rights Association (ACLU) revealed that 25 people have been mistakenly executed in the United States since the turn of the century for crimes they had not committed or had not even existed. 
We know Sacco and Vanzetti well, the Rosenbergs or Willie McGee. But how many others have been in their case that we do not know? Such human rights violations cannot be kept silent.


\section{Executions of minors}


In October 1991, Amnesty International stated that the United States executes more minors than any country in the world, apart from Iraq and Iran.

Between 1989 and 1994, only five other countries executed minors under the age of 18 at the time of the crime: 
Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. During the same period, eight juvenile offenders were executed in the United States, five of them in Texas alone.

This outrageous practice by the United States is in violation of international human rights norms and treaties.

Indeed, according to Article 6, paragraph 5, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: 
“A death sentence cannot be imposed for crimes committed by persons under the age of 18 and cannot be carried out against pregnant women.”
Similarly, according to Article 4, paragraph 5, of the American Convention on Human Rights: 
“The death penalty may not be imposed on persons who, at the time the crime was committed, were under 18 years of age or over 70 years of age...” 
The U.S. government signed both treaties in 1977, but has yet to ratify them.


\begin{quote}
\enquote{Despite these laws, only 9 US states maintaining the death penalty prohibit its application to people under the age of 18.

[...] In 17 states, legislation allows for the sentencing to death of minors under the age of 18. 
This limit is set either by legislation on capital punishment or by laws specifying the age at which minors, like adults, may be tried by the criminal courts. 
This age limit is 10 years in Indiana and Vermont, 12 years in Montana, 13 years in Mississippi, 14 years in Alabama, Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina and Utah, 15 years in Arkansas, Louisiana and Virginia, 16 years in Nevada and 17 years in Texas,  in Georgia and New Hampshire. 
Eleven other states did not specify any age limit.} \end{quote}\footnote{Amnesty International, Report on death penalty 1987.} ”

As with adults, race has an influence on the death penalty in many states. 
In Texas, eight of the nine minors on death row reported by Amnesty International in a January 1994 report were black or Hispanic-American, as were Curtis Harris and Ruben Cantu, the two minors executed in that state in 1993.


As with black adults, these defendants are not well represented and defended, most often by court-appointed, inexperienced and unmotivated lawyers.
They do not assert the influence of the environment and do not mention mitigating circumstances, foremost among which should be their youth, which makes them influenceable for good or bad.

In a 1991 study of young people sentenced to death in the United States, Amnesty International found that the majority of them came from particularly disadvantaged families.
Most of them had suffered severe physical or sexual violence and had below-average intelligence, or suffered from mental illness or brain damage.
Finally, many did not have adequate defence during their trial\footnote{Amnesty International : United States, Minors on “death row” (Index A I : AMR 51/23/91), publié en 1991.}.

\begin{quote}
\enquote{It has been found that, in some States, juveniles facing the death penalty are automatically tried by the ordinary courts in the absence of any individual assessment of the accused's capacity to be tried as an adult. 
In other cases, it is the fact that the juvenile justice system does not have institutions that can accommodate those sentenced to long sentences that seems, more than the maturity of the accused, to have been the main reason for referral to an ordinary court.} \end{quote} \footnote{Greenwald Hélène B., Capital Punishment for Minors : An Height Amendment Analysis, in \emph{Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology}, Volume 74, n° 74, 1983.}

\begin{quote}
\enquote{In a 1989 ruling that found the execution of minors between the ages of 16 and 17 acceptable, the Supreme Court observed that international standards were not relevant to “American moral standards.”
Shouldn't we aspire to raise American moral standards to the level of recognized international human rights standards?}
\end{quote} \footnote{Amnesty International, internal document, London, january 1994.}


\section{Executions of persons suffering from mental disorders and mental retardation}


A large number of prisoners suffering from mental disorders or mental retardation are under sentence of death and many others have been executed in the United States.

International safeguards, as well as a report by the Presidential Commission in 1991, are aimed at the elimination of the death penalty for mentally retarded accused.
Resolution 1989/64 adopted by ECOSOC in May 1988, [296] concerning the implementation of the safeguards guaranteeing protection of the rights of those facing the death penalty recommends “the abolition of the death penalty, both at the sentencing and execution stages, for persons with mental disabilities or persons whose mental capacities are extremely limited”.
The Presidential Committee on Mental Retardation particularly stresses the need to identify backward accused.
“Accused persons who suffer from mental retardation and who are not identified as such are at a serious disadvantage in the organisation of their defence...
Their rights may be less well protected and it may happen that the appropriate measures for their cause are not taken.
It is unlikely that these people are aware of their right to remain silent or to refuse to answer questions about their guilt.”
Amnesty International has documented more than 50 prisoners with severe mental disabilities executed in the United States since 1982.

Although, in principle, United States law prohibits the execution of the mentally ill, the assessment of the mental fitness of a convicted person to be executed is very superficial in many States.
Only nine States prohibit the use of the death penalty to the mentally retarded and several of them provide for a much lower intelligence quotient than that adopted in 1992 by the American Association on Mental Retardation.
It defines mental retardation as having an intelligence quotient not exceeding 70 to 75 before the age of 18.
However, North Carolina only prohibits execution if the defendants have an IQ of less than 60. Arkansas admits mental retardation only for an IQ below 65.
In June 1986, Jerome Bowden, a 33-year-old black man with mental retardation, was executed in Georgia for killing a white woman 10 years earlier during a robbery.
He had obviously been tried and convicted by a white judge and by a jury whose prosecutor had automatically challenged all blacks.
A psychologist gave him a three-hour intelligence test in prison.
According to the results of this test, his IQ was 65, a figure too high to spare him the execution according to the rules of Georgia. The next day, he was executed by electrocution.
A member of the Council of Pardons later indicated that Jerome Bowden would have been placed in a specialized institution if his IQ had been less than 45.
Thus Jerome Bowden, who was twelve years old mentally and who did not even understand what constituted a conviction and that death, as a punitive measure, meant nothing to him, had been deemed too intelligent to live!


/section{Control Units}

Located in southern Illinois, Marion Penitentiary opened in 1963 to replace Alcatraz, which closed the same year.
It is the most severe of the security prisons in the federal system. It was in Marion that the Control Unit (CU) began operating in July 1972.
Sixty inmates were locked up in sensory isolation and the entire prison became a Control Unit in 1983.

Since then, prisoners have been locked in their cells for 23 hours a day, completely isolated from other prisoners, in a cell measuring 2.40 m by 1.80 m, equipped only with a cement “bed”, a sink and a toilet glasses.
They eat, sleep and defecate in this cell. They are subjected to physical and psychological brutality, including beatings, rectal searches and other degrading measures.
Prisoners often lie down, chained to their beds, sometimes for several days. Visits are very limited, as is the right to receive letters or writing supplies.
Food is insufficient, access to medical care minimal. The penitentiary is guarded by guards known for their brutality.
The suicidal effects of sensory isolation and the “behaviour modification” programs that are practiced there are alarming. The Marion Control Unit has a suicide rate five times higher than the national rate.
In 1993, a new Control Unit was opened in Florence, Colorado, where Marion's little human contact was further reduced.

Marion and Florence are not isolated. Control Units are multiplying across the country.

Pelican Bay State Prison in California opened the Security Housing Unit (SHU) in December 1989. The SHU was designed for the permanent isolation of prisoners.
They are locked up for 22 and a half hours a day in their 7.4-square-metre cell and are only allowed a 90-minute “exercise” period, alone in a concrete “courtyard” as large as three cells, between 6-metre-high walls and under a metal fence.
The cell doors are operated remotely by the guards and they use loudspeakers to control the prisoners.
They are always chained and flanked by two guards armed with batons when they have to move out of their cells. Apart from the slamming of a door or the voice of a speaker, the SHU is perfectly silent.

California has a second Control Unit, at Folsom Prison, where the beds have been replaced with cement layers.
At Stateville Prison, Illinois, “uncontrollable” prisoners are isolated in small, windowless cells, with only a small slot in the door to pass through the food trays.
Other Units of the same type exist in Coxsachie, New York or Lebanon, Ohio and the list grows year by year.
According to a 1990 study by Marion's management, 36 states have adopted Marion-inspired Isolation Units.

Prison officials claim that the Control Units are intended for prisoners deemed too violent to stay in other prisons.
But already a 1983 congressional report claimed that 80 percent of the prisoners in Marion did not justify this level of security.
In reality, prisoners are sent to Marion for other reasons: organizing work stoppages, practicing their religion or taking too many legal actions.
In addition, many political prisoners were sent to Marion. The leader of the American Indian Movement, Leonard Peltier, and the member of the Black Liberation Army, Sekou Odinga, were sent directly from the court that sentenced them to Marion, which debunks the myth that Marion's prisoners were violent in other prisons.
In fact, in 1975, Ralph Arons, Marion's director, declared: “The objective of Marion's Control Unit is to control revolutionary behavior in the penitentiary system and in external society.”

In 1987, Amnesty International published a report condemning Marion Penitentiary in extremely harsh terms.
The report concluded that Marion's practices violated “the United Nations minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners” and added that marion's prison conditions constituted “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, condemned by the U.S. Constitution and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”



\section{Political prisoners}


In a 1978 interview with the French newspaper \emph{Le Matin}(The morning), Andrew Young, a member of the black community and then U.S. ambassador to the UN, said:
“ There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of political prisoners in American prisons.” This sentence earned him immediate dismissal by President Carter.

Of course, there can be no political prisoners in the United States, a country of free speech.
Yet these hundreds, thousands of men and women to whom Andrew Young referred, were arrested and thrown in jail, some even sentenced to death, because of their political ideas or their struggle for civil rights.
They were victims of the COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) program applied by the FBI from 1956 to 1971.
The FBI invented criminal charges against them, on the basis of false testimony, concealment of evidence, refusal of appeal or appeal...
Although the COINTELPRO program is no longer in effect today, the FBI's methods remain the same.
Activists find themselves isolated, treated by the press and justice as murderers, drug addicts, rapists... which makes solidarity movements difficult.
Almost all of these prisoners belong to ethnic minorities and the prevailing racism makes their cause even more difficult to defend.
These political prisoners also include a number of whites imprisoned for their practical assistance in the work of these minorities.

Political prisoners are subjected to very harsh prison conditions.
They are mostly incarcerated in “Control Units”, intended to “ subdue the strong heads and the leaders”. A chapter is devoted to these sinister jails.

The best known political prisoners were the black pastor Ben Chavis and the “Wilmington Ten”, Johnny “Imani” Harris, released on parole in 1991, after a first death sentence and twelve years in prison, Terrence Johnson, incarcerated in 1978 at the age of fifteen and released in 1994 after sixteen years of imprisonment, Dhoruba Bin Wahad,  Sentenced in 1973 to life imprisonment and dismissed in 1990, after 17 years in prison, Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, former leader of the California Black Panthers, imprisoned since 1968 and released on bail on June 10, 1997, under pressure from a powerful international solidarity movement.
Still behind bars are the leader of 1 American Indian Movement, Leonard Peltier in prison since 1976, David Rice and Ed Poindexter, both members of the Black Panthers, in prison since 1971, and Mumia Abu Jamal, former leader of the Black Panthers and president of the Philadelphia Black Journalists Union, sentenced to death in 1982 and still,  today, on "death row".
All were victims of fbi set-ups.


\section{Elmer “ Geronimo ” Pratt}


After twenty-six years in prison, fourteen applications for parole denied, and four unsuccessful appeals, Elmer “ Geronimo ”  Pratt was released on bail on June 10, 1997, pending a new trial that is intended to be impartial.

He was serving a life sentence for a murder that everyone knows he did not commit.

Geronimo is a political prisoner, the longest-serving current political prisoner. It is the symbol of resistance to repression and the fight for the liberation of black people in the United States.
He is a veteran of the Vietnam War, several times cited in the spotlight.
Demobilized in 1968, he then settled in Los Angeles where he began to participate in the activities of the Black Panther Party (BPP).

His action within the BPP, of which he became one of the leaders for California, made him a designated target for the FBI as part of Operation COINTELPRO.

On December 8, 1969, the BPP headquarters in Los Angeles had to undergo a full-blown military assault by the police.
Captured with his wife and seven other Panthers, Geronimo was sentenced to one to five years in prison for “illegal possession of a weapon”!

While in prison, Geronimo was charged with theft and the murder of a white woman on December 8, 1968 in Santa Monica, California.
Convicted on 28 July 1972, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Geronimo has always maintained his innocence and claimed that the case was fabricated by the FBI as part of Operation COINTELPRO and that, on the day of the murder in question, he was 600 kilometers from the scene of the crime, at a Black Panthers rally in Oakland.
Moreover, the FBI, which constantly monitored him, had the trace in its files. 
However, when Geronimo requested, under Freedom of Information Act \footnote{The Freedom of Information Act, passed by Congress in 1966 and amended in 1974 in a liberal sense, guarantees every American citizen the right of access to “records” and other “information” in the possession of authorities that would or would have harmed him.}, that the FBI provide this document, the FBI refused to do so.

Geronimo was found guilty on the testimony of the victim's husband. The latter admitted to having seen the aggressor only once, four years earlier, and for a few moments.
However, he identified Geronimo as the murderer, although he described the latter, a few weeks after the murder, as a very tall and very black man, while Geronimo is rather small and his complexion is close to that of an Indian (hence his nickname).

But the prosecution's main witness was Julius Butler, a former member of the BPP, who stated that Geronimo had given him a letter admitting guilty of the crime.
However, it was revealed that Butler was an FBI informant, which he had denied at the time of the trial.
After Geronimo's conviction, further evidence of irregularities committed by the FBI during the investigation was revealed:
three indicators had been placed in Geronimo's defence team and had provided documents on its strategy and tactics, as well as the testimony of at least two defence witnesses.
An eyewitness to the crime had identified another person as possibly the murderer, yet this information was not provided to Geronimo's lawyer.
The FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department had worked together and exchanged information regarding the investigation, arrest and trial in the Pratt case.

Geronimo's release is a victory. His victory. That of his lawyers and all those, in the United States and around the world, who campaigned for his release.
And also an immense encouragement to continue the struggles for the release of other political prisoners in the United States.


\section{Leonard Peltier}


Leonard Peltier, an Anishinabe-Lakota (Sioux) Indian, has been one of the leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) since 1970.
He is currently serving his twenty-second year in prison for a crime he did not commit, the victim of a collusion between the FBI and the American justice system to neutralize the American Indian Movement after the occupation of Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, in 1973.

Leonardo was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for the alleged murder of two FBI agents on the same reservation in South Dakota.
The charges for which he was incarcerated, as well as the “evidence” that led to his conviction, were entirely fabricated by the FBI, which presented false evidence, falsified ballistic reports, and threatened and intimidated witnesses into signing forgeries.
Yet, to date, no court has been able to prove his guilt.
On the contrary, during his trials and appeals, many pieces of evidence were gathered to prove the FBI's misconduct.
In an October 31, 1975 teletype, FBI ballistics experts report that none of the bullets found at the scene of the shooting could match the rifle belonging to Leonard Peltier.
This evidence was removed from the file and only reappeared, along with other documents, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act \footnote{The Freedom of Information Act, passed by Congress in 1966 and amended in 1974 in a liberal sense, guarantees every American citizen the right of access to “records” and other “information” in the possession of authorities that would or would have harmed him.}.
In addition, the FBI used false depositions to obtain Leonard Peltier's extradition from Canada to the United States, a serious violation of international law and the extradition treaty between the two countries.
In light of new evidence of the reprehensible attitude and inappropriate tactics employed in Leonard Peltier's prosecution, Attorney General Lynn Crooks admitted on November 9 before the Eighth Court of Appeals in Saint Paul, Minnesota: “We cannot prove who killed these officers.”
However, this same court refused, by granting a review of the trial that would have proved Peltier's innocence and prove the embezzlement of the FBI and the US government in this case.

In March 1996, despite the prosecutor's favourable opinion, the Federal Parole Office again refused to grant Leonardo a parole and informed him that the Office would again rule on his case... in 2008. In 12 years!

Deprived of the necessary care, Leonard Peltier has lost the use of one eye and his general condition remains worrying.
The only hope left for Leonard Peltier is in the hands of President Clinton, who has not yet responded to Leonardo's request for a presidential pardon in 1993.


\section{Mumia Abu Jamal}


Mumia Abu Jamal was raised in Philadelphia. He was a founding member (at age 15) of the Philadelphia Black Panther Committee.
This is where his career as a journalist began. He wrote in the Party newspaper as Minister of Information of the Local Committee.

He continued his work as a journalist by being a commentator on various radio stations. the city. During the 70s, Mumia published vigorous criticisms of the Philadelphia Police Department and its leader, Frank Rizzo.
He rejected Rizzo's version of the 1985 police siege against the Black Organization MOVE in Powelton Village, which involved more than 600 armed officers and resulted in the deaths of 11 MOVE members (six adults and five children).
His unwavering commitment to the poor and discriminated against earned him the nickname “the voice of the voiceless.”
His tireless investment in this form of journalism resulted in his dismissal from his radio station. He was forced to work as a taxi driver at night to feed his family.

On 9 December 1981, just before four o'clock in the morning, driving with his taxi and seeing a policeman beating his brother, he stopped to run to his rescue.
Upon arrival, police officers called in by police officer Faulkner found him lying on the ground, shot in the back and face. A few steps away, bathed in her blood, lay Mumia Abu Jamal.
The P.38 caliber revolver he had purchased after being robbed twice was found at the scene.

Police officer Faulkner died, an hour after the shooting, at the university hospital where Mumia was to undergo surgery:
a bullet from Faulkner's gun had hit him in the chest and lodged near his spine.
Claiming his innocence, Mumia Abu Jamal was charged with the murder of the policeman, despite the testimony of four people claiming to have seen a third man shoot and run away. He was brought to trial in early 1982.

The case was assigned to Judge Sabo, nicknamed “the king of death row”, holding the record for death sentences in the United States: 31 of which 29 were imposed on blacks.
He was also a member of the same police union as Faulkner: the “Brotherhood of police” (FOP), which casts doubt on his impartiality.

The trial was classic in the case of a black man. Mumia Abu Jamal was deprived of the choice of her lawyer and the financial means necessary for her defence.
He is forbidden to defend himself. He was given a court-appointed lawyer known for his incompetence.
All but one of the black jurors were excluded from the jury. The list is long of the irregularities that have punctuated this trial: bribery and intimidation of witnesses, concealment of evidence favorable to the defense, excessive politicization of the criminal phase of the trial by using FBI files relating to its activities within the Black Panther Party as definitive evidence “justifying the death penalty”,  refusal to take into account on appeal the revelations of repentant witnesses reporting police intimidation during the 1982 trial and also claiming to have seen another armed man run away from the scene of the shooting.
Finally, Judge Sabo remained on appeal, although he was then retired.

On 2 July 1982, Mumia Abu Jamal, accused of intentional homicide, was sentenced to death by Judge Sabo. He was due to be executed in August 1995.
Thanks to pressure from a powerful international support movement, Mumia was granted a stay of execution, but Judge Sabo refused to open a new trial until his final retirement on 26 November 1997.

At the time of writing (February 1998), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is considering the findings of the latest appeal by Mumia Abu Jamal's defenders.
In the event of a rejection, which would be followed by an execution warrant, a final appeal could be made at the federal level.

From the depths of his cell, for 16 years, Mumia has never stopped writing articles and campaigning for justice and against racism.
He wrote two very important books: \emph{Live from the Death Row} which was translated and edited in France under the title:
\emph{En direct du couloir de la mort} (Éditions La Découverte) and \emph{Death Blossoms} (The Plough Publishing House Editors, Farmington PA, USA).

Robert Pac

Robert Pac is a journalist, engaged for more than 25 years in the struggle alongside blacks, Indians and members of other ethnic minorities in the three Americas.
He is the author of \emph{Les guerres indiennes aujourd'hui}(Indians wars today) published by Messidor.
