– Anyone who sits on death row are green. Green as the dollar. That is, we were poor, that we had in common. No rich is sentenced to death,” said Kerry Cook.

– Exactly poverty is America’s greatest challenge today, according to the previously innocent doomed American.

Kerry Cook has an almost unbearable story to tell. But he tells it, to the Skavlan talkshow, for students, activists, and the media. Sometimes it is a relief to talk about the 21 years on death row. Other times, it opens the wounds. But Kerry Cook will win the fight against the death penalty, and he was working on it throughout the world – all the time.

His book Chasing Justice from 2007 is a legal thriller to describe one man’s struggle for life under the circumstances very few people can and want to imagine. Prison life was a perpetual struggle for survival, and Cook had to endure endless and serious assault.

“But what is hope,” he writes in the book, “other than the belief that something will change in the future.” This year it is 12 years since he got out on bail after 21 years on death row in Texas. 10 years ago, he was finally exonerated by DNA evidence.

Optimist
– I am optimistic and confident that the United States abolishes the death penalty in my life,” said Cook. Not least, it is Barack Obama who has given new hope to Cook.

– In the election campaign Obama said, without being asked, that he had problems with the death penalty, and that it bothered him that the innocent are convicted. When he said it, I thought that now he is not selected. The death penalty is still popular in the United States. But he won, and when I got the belief that we have a chance. The U.S. is in a new era, says Cook.

What makes the death penalty so popular still?
– It’s typical that we in the United States will not look at the background that we have crime, that people are criminals. In addition, U.S. law is very conservative, and was actively supported by George Bush jr. and his people,” said Cook. Despite this, he sees bright spots, such as the media increasingly write about innocent people who executed or is freed, and question the practice.

– When the U.S. wants to be champions of human rights, it should be embarrassed to be in the same stall as the People´s Republic of China, Iran and other countries which practice capital punishment, believes Cook. But he also believes that other countries are shockingly silent in their criticism of the United States.

– EU and Norway should boycott trade with the United States as long as we execute people. The world should see what they mean by action, not just words,” said Kerry Cook.

Use media
Cook believes that the good old form of action to stand outside the prisons with lights, and slogans no longer works. It is through the media campaign against the death penalty can be won.

– I always encourage activists to write posts in the newspapers, take part in media debates. It is the media which controls public opinion, people believe in what the newspapers write. Media are our weapons, underlines Cook.

– People must be educated to understand the human aspect in the fight against the death penalty. In this area Amnesty’s work is important, continues Cook who is aware that Amnesty must upgrade the fight against the death penalty in the United States.

– It’s OK that Amnesty is being increasingly focused on poverty and all over the world of work. People learn a lot from this. But when it comes to capital punishment, is no other voice! If you do not write this in their magazine, if Amnesty does not take up case, there’s quiet. My story would not have been anything but a black hole without the activists,” said Cook.

Poor judged and die
In the book he describes how Texas on one hand, NASA, while on the other hand, is in stone age when it comes to the legal system.

– Innocent poor are judged. We have come across this with racial divides. Now it is poverty that is,” said Cook, who is increasingly involved in this issue. He tells of an American society where children grow up on their own, join gangs and carry out orders from the leader.

The gang becomes the family they have not. There is another and the poor United States, as one does not see in Hollywood movies or as a tourist, and it is from here that the victims of the legal system and capital punishment is coming.

This is Kerry Cook
20 years old Kerry Cook was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of 21-year-old Linda Jo Edwards in Texas. For the next 21 years Kerry spent in a cell full of rats, in anticipation of the execution. In 1999 Kerry was acquitted on the basis of secure DNA test. He was wrongly convicted. Kerry has since spent much of his life to tell his story, both through lectures worldwide and in the book from 2007, “Chasing Justice”.

***
PTI, La Stampa, www.zeenews.com
Belarus starts campaign on abolition of death penalty 

The last country in Europe still exercising death penalty, Belarus, will soon launch an information campaign to press for the abolition of death penalty, President Aliaksandr Lukashenka, left, said on 30 November.

“We will hold parliamentary hearings and discuss the issue in the media. The people will decide whether death penalty should be abolished or not,” Lukashenka told the Italian newspaper La Stampa.

The overwhelming majority of Belarusian citizens supported death penalty in a referendum in 1996, Lukashenka said.

Only a new referendum can change things, he noted.

“If we hold a new referendum right now, it will have the same results as the previous one,” Lukashenka said.