Andreas Jeninga/The Hoya Members of Georgetown’s Campaign to End the Death Penalty participated in a rally at the Baltimore Supermax Prison on Saturday.
Last Saturday, members of the Georgetown chapter of Campaign to End the Death Penalty traveled to the Baltimore Supermax Prison to oppose Maryland’s support of the death penalty.
The students participated in the “Stop Legal Lynching, Abolish the Racist Death Penalty” rally with over more than 50 members from other local chapters of Campaign to End the Death Penalty. The rally lasted for just over an hour and was peaceful, without any opposition groups present.
For most of the rally, the members marched in the prison parking lot, making one trip around the entire prison complex.
The protesters held up signs to passing traffic and chanted as they marched. They shouted chants, including “One, two, three, four, it’s racist, cruel and anti-poor. Five, six, seven, eight, stop the murder by the state” and “Politicians they don’t care; Innocent people get the chair.”
After the march ended, the protesters gathered and the leaders of the local chapters spoke, calling for the abolition of the death penalty.
Shujah Graham, an exonerated death row inmate, also spoke to rally members, sharing his experience on death row and encouraging the protesters to keep fighting.
Anne Thompson (COL ’04), president of Georgetown’s chapter of Campaign to End the Death Penalty, said she was pleased with the event.
“The event was a successful demonstration of the grassroots opposition to the death penalty,” she said. “I have been protesting against the death penalty at the Supermax Prison for four years now and will continue to participate in the protests to prevent the state from killing in my name.”
The rally at the prison focused on a University of Maryland study that reported that Maryland’s death penalty is applied in a discriminatory manner and the refusal of Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, a Republican, to comment or act on the information in the study.
Former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening, a pro-death penalty Democrat, funded the $225,000 long-term study and put a moratorium on the death penalty until the findings of the study were complete.
When Ehrlich took office this January, he lifted the moratorium and has pledged to veto any bill abolishing the death penalty that passes through the state legislature.
The rally was the final event of the Death Penalty Awareness Week, an event that wasstarted two years ago by the Georgetown chapter of Campaign to End the Death Penalty and has since been adopted nationally.