ONE
YEAR LATER
Justice Is a Verb!
©Wendell
Griffen, 2018
April 18, 2018
One year ago I and other members of
New Millennium Church took part in a peaceful and reverent Good Friday prayer
vigil outside the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion to express our moral and
religious opposition to capital punishment and our solidarity with Jesus of
Galilee, the leader of our faith who was put to death by crucifixion at the order
of Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of Palestine. We remembered that Jesus was a subject of
capital punishment.
On the following Monday (April 17,
2017), the Arkansas Supreme Court permanently banned me from all civil and
criminal cases involving capital punishment, the death penalty, or the method
of execution in Arkansas. So last October,
I filed a civil rights lawsuit against each member of the Arkansas Supreme
Court in federal court.
In that lawsuit, I challenged the
permanent ban issued by the justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court as a
violation of my First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, freedom of
assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom to exercise my religion, and my
Fourteenth Amendment right to due process of law (because I was not given
notice nor a hearing before it was imposed).
I also challenged the permanent ban as a violation of my Fourteenth
Amendment right to equal protection under the law (because it is more severe
than punishment imposed to white judges who committed notorious and illegal
conduct such as accepting a bribe, drunken and reckless driving, and demanding
and accepting sexual favors from defendants in exchange for issuing lenient
sentences). And I challenged the
permanent ban because it resulted from conspiracy by the justices of the
Arkansas Supreme Court and others to deprive me of the powers of my elected
office based on animosity against me because I am African-American.
On April 12, 2018, the federal court
ruled that my lawsuit asserts factually plausible claims that the justices of
the Arkansas Supreme Court violated my rights to freedom of speech, freedom of
assembly, freedom of religion, freedom to exercise my religion, due process of
law, and equal protection under the law.
The federal court also ruled that my lawsuit asserts a factually
plausible claim that the permanent ban issued by the justices of the Arkansas
Supreme Court resulted from an illegal civil conspiracy to deprive me of my
right to equal protection under the law.
Now my lawyers will uncover and expose the facts that bear out my legal
claims, facts that the justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court and others are
desperate to hide.
I am as committed to the rule of law
today as I was a year ago, if not more so.
I am as committed to holding and expressing my moral and religious
opposition to the death penalty as I was a year ago, if not more so. That is why I joined other members of New
Millennium Church last night (April 17, 2018) in attending another peaceful and
reverent vigil and demonstration outside the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. Again, I lay on a cot in silent prayer. Again, I had my Bible. Again, I wore a button calling for an end to
the death penalty.
Arkansas law makes death by lethal
injection one of two alternative punishments for capital murder (the other
alternative is life imprisonment without parole). I followed that law before Good Friday, 2017,
and I will follow it whenever my authority to preside over capital cases is
restored. I took an oath to follow the law, including laws that I consider
objectionable on moral and religious grounds.
My obligation to follow the law does not
compel me to agree with every law. The First
Amendment to the US Constitution protects my freedom to hold and express moral
and religious opposition to the death penalty, including freedom to peacefully and
lawfully question the morality of state-sanctioned premeditated and deliberate
killing of people who have been convicted for the premeditated and deliberate
killing of other persons.
If a person who has been convicted of premeditated
murder is deliberately and premeditatedly killed, we should condemn that
killing as murder. Murder is wrong, even
when the state hires people to do it. Anger
and bloodlust are not excuses for the state to commit premeditated murder of people
who have committed premeditated murder for an understandable reason. Two wrongs don’t make anything right.
That was true a year ago.
It is true a year later.
