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Behind Bars

Getting Screwed

By Kevin Cooper

This statement was prepared by innocent death row inmate, Kevin Cooper, for a live telephone call-in to the Denton, Texas stop on the national tour: “Lynching Then, Lynching Now: The Roots of Racism and the Death Penalty in America.” Cooper speaks out as another victim of an arbitrary, cruel, and torturous death penalty system. Mark White, former governor of Texas and a death penalty supporter, recently wrote an op-ed in the National Law Journal in which he called for a new trial for Charles Hood, a Texas death row inmate whose trial was severely compromised and undermined by the fact that the prosecutor and the trial judge had been in an intimate relationship prior to the trial. As former Gov. White explained, “The judge and the prosecutor at Hood’s trial had a long-term secret affair prior to the trial and concealed the relationship for 20 years. This was a secret that the pair kept even when they knew Hood was on the brink of execution and was trying to verify the rumors of the relationship.” White wrote, “The trial judge and the prosecuting attorney’s affair breaches every standard of fairness that you would expect a defendant to receive during a capital case or, for that matter, a noncapital case. Hood could not have gotten a fair trial under these circumstances. “The former governor also wrote: “Hood’s case shows, at the most basic level, that there are huge flaws in our procedures and human frailties in the people who administer them. —Carole Seligman, Socialist Viewpoint

Kevin Cooper’s statement: Good Evening. It appears that in the Charles Hood case there in Texas, not only were the Judge and Prosecutor screwing each other, they were also screwing Charles Hood, and the Justice system.

The main difference in this case, and the natural state of affairs in the criminal justice system, is that the Judge and Prosecutor were literally screwing each other, and that they got busted.

We have long known that in America, and especially within Texas, poor people of all cultures have been screwed by the system as a whole, but especially when it comes to the death penalty.

This is one of the main reasons why you and your help are truly needed in this fight to end the death penalty, and to keep us all from getting screwed.

For more information on how you can get involved in the struggle to save Kevin Cooper, visit the website: www.savekevincooper.org