This Poem

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five: The Message

This song is from 1982 and is widely acknowledge as the first Hip Hop song to make it into the charts (or the first Hip Hop song). This video is a bit dated but worth a watch. The lyrics are amazing:
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkies in the alley with the baseball bat
I tried to get away but I couldn’t get far
Cause a man with a tow truck repossessed my car

Despite the fact this record was released thirty five years ago nothing much seemed to have changed for people of colour in the USA. The Black Lives Matter campaign has highlighted the fact that police seemed to have a shoot first ask questions later policy for black people.

A disproportionate number of young black men end up in prison and the number of black homeless people is now estimated at 500,000. African Americans are only 12.6 percent of the country’s population and yet account for more than 40 percent of its homeless population.

My poem this week is about a teenager called Napoleon Beazley a young black man who

was involved in a car jacking during which a man called John Luttig died. It happened when he was 17 years old and although convicted as a minor he was still executed by lethal injection after spending eight years on death row. Napoleon said at his appeal.
“It’s my fault,” Beazley said at a court hearing , at which a judge set his execution date. “I violated the law . . . and I violated a family — all to satisfy my own misguided emotions. I’m sorry. I wish I had a second chance to make up for it, but I don’t.
Although Beazley had no final words, he left a written statement in which he accepted responsibility for the crime but opposed capital punishment. “No one wins tonight,” he wrote. “No one gets closure. No one walks victorious.”

The quotes are taken from an article in the Washington Post by Paul Duggan. For the full article click here

This is not to say that Napoleon Beazley should not have been punished or in any way to mitigate what he did but to execute someone is not the answer. I have always opposed the death penalty, it does not make people safer or deter those who would kill. The law rightly acknowledges that murder is a dreadful crime and that it deserves a severe sentence but to kill someone because you believe killing is wrong is nonsensical.

Eight countries in the world allow the execution of young people who have committed a crime when they were age 18 years of less Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Yemen, Iraq and USA.
Since the USA Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1990 over 1,500 people have been executed.

This Poem

This poem shot John Luttig during the theft of his car on April 19th 1994
This poem was one of three men involved in the attack
This poem admitted that in the instant after it killed Mr Luttig
This poem was full of regret at the stupid and pointless waste of a life
This poem was seventeen and wasn’t old enough to buy alcohol or cigarettes
This poem was old enough for The State of Texas to sentence to death
This poem took only a few seconds to kill John Luttig
This poem was kept for eight years on death row in a cell 6 x 9 feet
This poem admits the killing of John Luttig was a senseless and heinous crime
The killing of this poem by the State of Texas was premeditated and in cold blood
The State of Texas executed this poem for a crime committed by a child

© Jeff Price March 2018