So, thank you all so much for coming out tonight in the freezing cold.
I know, it cooled down a lot since we've been out here all day.
It's been a really wonderful experience, to have you all at the conference here today.
I know I'm really grateful to have the voices of so many who have been affected, you know,
by dehumanization, and who are working to change the world and create a culture of peace
and life, and to rehumanize.
So, my name's Aimee, in case there's like, some randos who might be here and haven't
attended the conference all day and heard me talk six million times.
My name's Aimee Murphy, I am the executive director of Rehumanize International.
We're the ones who are putting on these rad conference right here at Duquesne University
this weekend, hosted by Consistent Ethic of Life at Duquesne.
Give them a quick shoutout.
Thank you so much for all you're doing.
So, this vigil tonight is for victims of our injustice system.
When thinking about what topic to address this year in the vigil, during the Rehumanize
Conference, I kept coming back to the meaning of justice — and I mulled on it for days.
What does justice mean?
Some dictionary definitions of justice read simply, "just behavior or treatment."
With a thes — with a, with a thesaurus list including fairness, equity, impartiality,
honesty, and righteousness.
But all of these words mean different things and don't, on an individual level, cut to
the heart of what justice is, though I would consider them closely related.
What I've colloquially heard as the definition of justice is "to give one what is their due."
Our current justice system in the United States is steeped in systemic racism, xenophobia,
homophobia, and transphobia, and all too often, the system represents violence on violence,
as the death penalty and death by incarceration persist.
Our so-called justice system is retributive, and it kills.
Tonight we will hear from five different speakers on the stories and experiences of those who
have been dehumanized and violated by our U.S. justice system.
We are here in memory of those who have passed on, in solidarity with those who are now dehumanized,
and in the hope of building a future in which life, peace, and justice will be inseparable.
Where is Ifeoma?
You're not ready yet?
Okay.
Then first I would like to bring up Herb Geraghty with Rehumanize International.
Hi.
So, I am — can you hear me?
Okay.
So, I am here tonight to talk about state violence against people like me -- members
of the LGBT community.
Something that I think gets lost in our collective memory of the LGBT rights movement, if we
remember the Stonewall Uprisings at all, is exactly what heroes like Sylvia Rivera and
Marsha P. Johnson were fighting for.
It's important to remember that these revolutionaries were fighting and taking a bold stand against
state repression and police violence -- fighting for their lives.
Since then, since the Stonewall Uprisings, some things have changed -- we can now marry,
we can now love, and no longer can I be arrested for not wearing three or more pieces of "feminine
clothing" -- an actual Pennsylvania law that I am grateful no longer stands.
However, despite these advances, our struggle against state repression and police violence
is far from over.
Today, LGBT people still face increased rates of violence at the hands of law enforcement
and are overrepresented in the prison industrial complex.
This is a direct result of homophobia being compounded with poverty, being compounded
with racism, being compounded with misogyny -- and particularly transmisogyny.
According to a study done by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 21% of all transgender
women have been incarcerated at some point in their lives.
That's compared to a 5% in the general population.
When looking at black transgender women, the stat jumps to an astonishing 47% incarceration
rate.
While we have made strides in combating homophobia and transantagonism, especially for the white,
and especially for the rich, there is still a deadly cycle in all parts of our country
that starts with LGBT youth being kicked out of the home, onto the streets, turning to
illegal street markets such as sex work or the drug trade, getting arrested, going to
prison, getting out, living on the street, and the cycle starts over again.
When this happens, who is blamed?
It's not the structures that create poverty.
It's not the people in power benefiting and profiting from this cycle.
No -- it's LGBT people ourselves.
So, when we end up in prison, it doesn't matter what happens to us.
Abuse, increased rates of sexual assault, denial of prescribed transition care on top
of already subpar medical standards.
The torture of prolonged solitary confinement under the guise of "safety" for transgender
women.
All of these things, on top of the daily dehumanization and violence that is seen in all parts of
the US prison system -- public and private.
This is unacceptable.
It's inhumane, and it's time for state violence against LGBT people to end.
I'd like to take a minute now for a moment of silence.
Not just for those who have died, such as LGBT rights activist Scout Schultz who was
tragically shot and killed by campus police in Georgia last year.
For them, but also for all those still facing state violence.
For the 40% of houseless youth who identify as LGBT and are subject to police harassment
for simply existing in public while houseless.
For the trans and gender nonconforming humans doing sex work to survive, constantly in fear
of physical and sexual violence from police.
For every incarcerated LGBT person suffering from state repression, especially those facing
death by incarceration sentences.
For them may we take a moment of silence.
Thank you.
It's kind of jarring, right?
To have, like, the solemnity of this...and the raucousness of that.
I...I'm hoping that someday — you know, like of course we need recreation, and we
need refreshment, and we need to be reinvigorated.
So I'm not hating on the people who love football, but I kind of am, because it's bread and circuses,
when you think about the fact that we have so many human beings who are caught in these
structures of dehumanization and violence.
Next up, we have Saleem Holbrook with the Human Rights Coalition.
Welcome, Saleem.
So I'm gonna read something that I wrote real quick on juveniles sentenced to life without
parole, solitary confinement, and death by incarceration.
This moment is for the souls disappeared within the bowels of the prison system, condemned
to die a slow death each and every day because they are serving a death by incarceration
sentence that allows for no hope of redemption.
This moment is for the children confined in adult prisons, facing a future of uncertain
days, nights laced with traumatized dreams, hopes that evaporate as quickly as the tears
that run down their smooth, adolescent faces.
This moment is for the people buried alive in solitary confinement torture chambers,
driven insane and to suicide by the suffocating isolation and silence that bores into them,
like a screw, searing through the soft tissue of the brain; locked away in cells that are
illuminated 24 hours a day, but where one feels an absence of light, and only a feeling
of darkness; no one hearing their screams that echo back to them from doors made of
stainless steel, and pressurized cells that resemble tombs.
This moment is for the people who died at the hands of a system that did not recognize
their humanity, nor extend them dignity, even in their death, for there's no dignified death
in prison.
I think of Sharon "Peachie" Wiggins, sentenced to life without parole at the age of 14 for
being an accessory to an armed robbery in 1976 — who went on to earn a master's degree,
and who by her own will, counseled thousands of women in prison at SCI Muncy.
I remember the hope she was filled with in 2012, when the United States Supreme Court
ruled it was cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a child to life without parole.
I remember the despair and the pain she felt when she was diagnosed with cancer that same
year, and the disbelief when she died two years later, still in prison.
This moment is for John "J-Rock" Carter, who was sentenced to life without parole as child,
and who served sixteen years.
He was murdered in 2012 in the solitary confinement unit at SCI Rockview, by guards who pumped
multiple canisters of chemical munitions into the cell, suffocating him to death; who then
refused him immediate medical attention and blamed him for his own death.
"If he only hadn't resisted," they said.
His offense?
Refusing to turn in his food tray.
This moment is for the countless, nameless, and faceless people who suffer at the hands
of a system that is irreparable and indefensible.
It is also for the victims and communities who have been harmed by the people who are
entombed in the bowels of the system.
We owe it to them, to ourselves, and to humanity to envision a world and community where prisons
do not exist.
We owe it to future generations to make that world possible.
I would like to take a moment of silence for all of them.
Thank you.
Every time I think about the fact that there are people who were sentenced as children
to live their life behind bars, with no opportunity of freedom, my soul is crushed.
I made so many mistakes as a teenager, and I can't imagine a system that punishes children
for the rest of their lives for a mistake they made as a teen.
We have a responsibility to do better, and to seek better.
Next up, we have Maria Oswalt with Rehumanize International.
Uh, Herb could you go ahead and come up?
Sorry, I just had a couple images as well, um, that Herb is gonna pull up on his tablet
there.
Um, okay, so.
As Aimee said, my name is Maria Oswalt.
I am here today to talk about the violence of ICE and deportation and the dehumanization
of immigrants from my perspective as a hispanic woman, and as the granddaughter of immigrants
from Cuba and Ecuador.
So as I was preparing for this, I had a bulleted list of different statistics and headlines
from the past couple years, and in years before that — you know, like how nearly 3,000 children
were separated from their parents over the course of just six weeks in April and May
of this year.
How only about 80% of those children have been reunited with their parents or resettled
with other family members.
These stats are pretty jarring — however, I think it's easy to get lost in all the
numbers and the headlines that we've seen in recent news.
In order to really bring home the way the rhetoric in our country has caused us to value
so-called justice over human lives, in order to emphasize that these policies aren't
only affecting a certain class of people but rather intimately affecting individual children,
and families, I wanted to focus on just one story.
It's one of many, as we all know, but it'll give us a face and name to remember when we
think about this.
This is Helen.
She is a five-year-old from Honduras.
She says her favorite activity is playing with her dolls, and she wants to be a veterinarian
when she grows up.
In July — which was well after Trump's executive order, which was supposed to reverse
the policy of separating families, Helen fled Honduras with her grandmother and a few other
family members because one of her family members — a teenage boy named Christian — was
being threatened by gang members, so they no longer felt safe there.
Helen's mother, Jenny, had already migrated to Texas four years earlier, so they hoped
to seek asylum in the U.S. and join her.
Her family travelled thousands of miles to get to the U.S., and eventually they reached
southern Texas.
When they arrived, border patrol agents apprehended them, and then a plainclothes officer pulled
Helen away from her grandmother and told them that the grandmother would be deported and
that Jenny, Helen's mom, would be able to pick her up soon.
The officer didn't tell them where they were taking her in the meantime.
Helen's grandmother and other family members were given ankle bracelets and released to
wait for their court dates, so they went to Jenny's house as quickly as possible...but
they did not find Helen there.
The next day authorities called to tell them that Helen was being kept in a facility near
Houston, although they wouldn't tell them exactly where.
Now we know that Helen was taken to a shelter called Baytown, where she essentially spent
the rest of her summer coloring pictures of George Washington, the Statue of Liberty,
and other patriotic images.
At some point during the time that she was kept there, an official handed her a legal
document — a form to request a Flores Bond hearing — and they convinced, or rather
coerced, this five-year-old girl to sign away her right to a bond hearing before a judge.
Thankfully Helen's story has a happy ending because her family hired legal help from an
organization called Lupe, and they were able to reunite Helen with her family on September
7th, two months after they'd arrived in the US.
There are still many children, some even younger than Helen, who haven't been as lucky — if
you can call it that.
This heartbreaking, infuriating injustice is the direct result of a system which seeks
to value American lives over other human lives, which values arbitrary lines in the ground
over basic human decency.
And I'm not just talking about the current administration — this dehumanization was
going on well before 2016.
It just seems like the general public is waking up to it now, and we need to take this opportunity
to shine a light on all the evil going on in our justice system.
It's the result of a worldview which dehumanizes immigrants to the point that people seeking
just a safer and better life are treated as less than human, where an immigrant five-year-old
girl is treated like a criminal.
This is the form that Helen was made to sign.
You can see where the officer wrote her name, and then below that, there's a space designated
for "child's alien number," and then you can see where five-year-old Helen wrote
her own name.
I don't have anything else to say.
We have to do better.
Oh!
Shoot, I'm sorry.
This summer I got to meet a nun who works on the border, down in Texas.
And she told me so many of the stories of people who have passed through her house of
hospitality...and it just struck me, the grief, and the anger.
And I just think of the absolute chilling inhumane treatment of these children just
because they are from another country.
Just because they are from a country where the immigration quota has already been met.
We have to do better.
So, um.
Last up, we are going to have Kirk Bloodsworth with Witness to Innocence, and then we're
gonna close out and let y'all go warm up.
But thank you all so much for coming out tonight.
I wanna talk about Chris Conover.
Chris Conover and I were in prison together.
I think this is important because...he was in there for nineteen years, so nine years
more than I was — actually ten, I'm sorry.
So I got out in '93, in 2003 I got a call from the Innocence Project in New York, and
they said, "Hey, do you know Chris Conover?" and I said, "Yeah, we were, we were walking
buddies.
We were in the yard together.
He sold a pretty good jug of wine."
But, Chris had a lot of problems.
He was, he did a twelve-year bit, um, you know, he was stealing and robbing with his
brother, they got caught up in this thing, he just did twelve years, then he got out,
and the county police came and got him and charged him with triple homicide at this drug
dealer's house.
They sat in court and said these two head hairs were Chris's head hairs.
But as it turned out, in 2003, when — you know, 'cause he came in right after, right
before I did — and not only were they not his head hairs, they were two different head
hairs.
Chris got out, but he took an Alford plea.
And the Alford pleas are, like, one of the worst things in the world, I think, to give
anyone...you don't admit your guilt, but yeah, you do, because you can't get compensation,
you can't get any kind of help.
So I...Chris got really excited with me one day when we were talking, and I said, "Let's
see if we can't get you a pardon, minus the Alford plea."
I knew the governor, I worked on the death penalty.
We worked on that, I worked on that case and I sat right in the governor's office and looked
him right in eye, and said, "You gotta give Chris a pardon.
Give him a break.
You know, you don't have to abide by the Alford plea."
There was no law that said he had to.
So, we worked on it for four years, and the governor's office called me on the phone and
said, "Kirk, we're gonna have to deny Chris Conover, his pardon."
Because back that you had to, in order to get compensated, you had to get pardoned.
They turned him down flat — and this was with a liberal governor who pushed to abolish
the death penalty.
Martin O'Malley.
I didn't know what to do, and I remember going down to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and talking
to my man.
He was...he was...he had a dog walking business.
He did that all the time.
He was just trying to hustle, make money, good.
But he had really bad knees, so the doctors in North Carolina put him on Vicodin for five
years.
Chris was a heroin addict.
That was bad for Chris.
I was sitting there on his porch, and he had a morphine patch on his cheek.
He said, "Bloods, I've had it man."
I said, "You've gotta stop, Chris.
We gotta try to do something for you."
He said, "Ain't nothing to do for me.
I wanna leave."
And I knew what that meant.
So I started reaching out to him, again and again and again — I talked to his wife,
his high school sweetheart, that they married, under a tressle in his backyard by this big
pond in Kitty Hawk.
But he was...Chris was gone, I couldn't reach him anymore.
I was sitting down on my computer, and I had Facebook up, and his niece wrote me a letter
and said, "Chris is gone."
He went to Baltimore and he tried to kill himself three times, with a hot dose of heroin.
And he left here.
I think his life would've changed if somebody had paid attention to Chris.
He wasn't an expendable human being, like so many people think incarcerated individuals
are.
This was a guy that made a mistake.
But he wasn't in there for that.
They wouldn't give Chris nothing because he had been convicted before.
Chris took his own life on the third try.
It was a charm for him.
I went to his funeral, and the lady from the Innocence Project in New York was there, and
twenty of his friends, it wasn't many.
And there was his urn.
It sat on the table.
He was gone.
My buddy was gone.
His nickname was "white folks."
That's what they called him.
I think, for me, we have to pay attention to this arbitrary nature which is the criminal
justice system, in a sense.
People like Helen, and others that we've spoken about.
The people in your spot, which you talked about so eloquently, when I was listening
to you — shouldn't be treated like animals.
We're not — this is not a farm.
We're not "feed-up time."
You know, the death penalty has to go, but we have to have major criminal justice reform.
Major criminal justice reform.
We're not — our worst act is not the end of us.
People need second chances.
And I supported, you know, the fight for kids who are different in the death penalty arena,
so we don't have that anymore.
I guess, after I help abolish the death penalty, we're gonna have to do something else.
We can't have life without parole for children, man.
We've gotta give them a shot.
Give them a chance.
Or they're all gonna turn out like Chris.
I wanna thank you, this has been a great experience.
I want you all to stand up, like my mother said, and never look back.
I know it's a small group of people, us standing out here in the cold, but let me tell you
something: a few people have done far more than that.
They've held off battalions of people with far less than this here.
And I think we could do it ourselves.
God bless you all.
Thank you.
So I just realized that I forgot someone.
I forgot Ifeoma because of course I did.
I'm so sorry.
So, um.
We're actually gonna have Ifeoma come up, but I just really want to echo what Kirk said.
We are not our worst action.
None of us are.
And I think that people who have been...imprisoned, incarcerated, found guilty — whether or
not they did the crime — they deserve better than the justice system that we have now,
so we have to do better.
So, I want to welcome Ifeoma.
Come on up.
So the words I'm gonna read to you are from Ismail Smith-Wade-El, who regrets that he
couldn't make it here tonight.
But more importantly, we're all here, in this moment.
So what's important in this moment that concerns me, at this moment, is a reversal.
Where previously it was possible to imagine that we had reached an unprecedented point
of progress in American society, one where it seemed we had the stride in an unruly march
forward, toward the end of King's long arc of justice.
The arc of justice, my friends, is broken.
The great, yawning injustices of America are apparent in every corner of our society.
In elections and lost battles, lost legal battles, that devalue human life and threaten
to crush the spirit of activism that we rely on to move forward.
But it is the individual defeats, the single deaths, of somehow unmatched injustice that
leave the taste of acid in our mouths.
I have been counting the names.
I have been counting the names since I lived in Pittsburgh in 2012.
Trayvon Martin.
I have been counting the names, since 2014, '15.
Michael Brown.
Rekia Boyd.
Tamir Rice.
Michael Scott.
Sandra Bland.
Example after example of black lives taken by their own government.
These amount to state-sanctioned executions, at the hand of police officers, or with the
blessing of judges and juries.
This is not acceptable, and it's not defensible.
In every one of these examples, civility has been the watchword.
What is it that these black lives were doing when they were killed?
What can be invented, or dug up from the shadows to justify their killing?
In front of a media that values black lives only to the degree that their pain, that our
pain, can be used to sell papers and clicks.
We have endured this for years, but as I write, I think of Botham Shem Jean, who was just
killed by a police officer in his own apartment, under deeply suspect circumstances.
A Godly man, a young professional.
Wearer of suits, and singer of songs.
Shot dead in his own home.
What excuse can be offered up for this man's life?
None.
But in truth, every justification or reason that came before was just that — an excuse.
These times, where black people can not walk, vote, shop, run for office, barbecue, babysit,
or live without being threatened with police violence, must be our clarion call to defend
the dignity of black and brown lives, no matter who they are.
One of the things that makes us human — socially, anthropologically — is how we mourn our
dead.
Would that we could be more like...would that we could mourn our black and brown bodies
that were shot down, died of thirst in the desert, pushed out of their homes in Pittsburgh,
or in San Francisco.
By refusing to accept any flimsy excuse for the taking of these lives, and defend them
with our hearts, with our policies, and with our bodies...let that be our eulogy for them.
That we defend them.
I will close with an excerpt from the poet Danez Smith.
They wrote: "Another brown man is dead, and now he's my
ancestor.
I was older than him before, but now he's endless.
What do our people do with their ghosts?
What do your people do with their ghosts?"
Thank you.
Thank you, Ifeoma.
As we close tonight, let us remember all of those who have been harmed and dehumanized
by the injustice within our so-called justice system.
Let us rehumanize, and let us work towards a day when all human beings, guilty or innocent,
will be respected, valued, and protected.
If we work towards a future where restorative justice is the paradigm, in which human beings
will be valued for their intrinsic worth, then justice and mercy will be so obviously
inextricable...inextricably linked, that to tear them apart would be to act contrary to
human dignity, and in so doing would be contrary to authentic justice.
So let this moment be just a stepping off point for the work that we do in the future,
that we are called to do, that we are compelled to do, because we have seen the injustice
and we cannot go back.
I wanna offer one final moment of silence for all of those whom we have remembered this
evening.
Thank you so much for coming.
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