WE OPPOSE THE DEATH PENALTY IN ALL CASES. EVEN IN THE CASE OF A TRAFFIC STOP.

Law enforcement is a dangerous job, however too many individual police officers feel free to assume the role of judge, jury and executioner. When a government official, acting in an official capacity, takes a life when neither themselves or others are directly threatened, whether planned or spontaneous, such action is an extra-judicial execution.

Death Penalty Action opposes extra-judicial executions as a form of the death penalty, and it must stop. Extra-judicial executions, carried out in the hands of those sworn to protect, overwhelmingly target the black community and other people of color. Racism is systemic in the United States and pervasive throughout the criminal legal system. Racism is unmistakable in the capital punishment system, rooted in and inextricably linked to the United States’ history of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation.

The undersigned are asking Congress today to enact national legislation that:

• Bans “chokeholds”
• Ends no-knock warrants
• Tracks and analyzes data involving law enforcement officer-involved shootings, including data on the race of law enforcement officers and those killed or injured in such shootings
• Investigates law enforcement officers with a track record of abusive use of power, including those in corrections
• Removes impediments to prosecuting law enforcement officers when there was no legitimate need for the use of lethal violence

No one should have to die because of the color of their skin or where they happen to travel, live, work and/or raise their families. We demand that Congress take action to ensure that these common sense measures are enacted on a national level so that our nation can move toward healing, and closer to the ideal of “Equal Justice Under Law.”