Native Lampod is production of iHeartRadio and partnership with Reason Choice Media.
Welcome home, y'all.
This is Native Lampod Today, this is our mini pod, and we are talking about capital punishment in this country. Just this week, I spent some time talking about James brodn Next, who is scheduled to be scheduled to be killed frankly executed in the state of Texas on Thursday,
just this past Thursday. And so with that, what comes into question is how many people are on death row, how many black people in particular are on death row who are wrongfully accused, And when they do plead their cases, when they do say this is not what happened, or there's somebody that comes forward and comes forward and confesses to the crime, like in James Broadnax's case, how does the country respond. So, I, personally, y'all, I don't like
capital punishment. I don't believe in the death penalty. I'm always surprised by the fact that the Republican Party, which is supposed to be, you know, the party of like the right to live, they don't only care about that is when you come out your mother's womb, and then after that they couldn't give a flying damp. So I'm always curious to know where people fall on this, you know, spectrum. I do not like the death penalty. I don't think that it's up to us to take anybody's life. I just don't.
I'm more conflicted than that.
I ain't gonna lie to you, and this is this is one of the political issues that conflicts me the most. And the reason why is that I was firmly in the anti death penalty camp. And it was easy to be there because you read the statistics.
You see how many.
Black folk are a wrong fleet on death penalty, on death row, excuse me, you see how many people are exonerated. I don't think that you know, we have the right to play god. You hear all of those things, and then you're directly affected by it.
Right.
And so when Dylan Ruf walked into a church in June of twenty fifteen and killed my good friend and eight others while they were in Bible study, he stood over Polly Shepherd said I'm gonna let you live because somebody has to tell the story. There was a young girl in the room who literally was covered up by her aunt while there was blood on the floor, and you know Clym, who was my friend, who was my state senator, My good friend actually let this draggly white boy into the room sit beside him.
They prayed, and they went through there. Most people don't know this.
They went through the entire Bible study and when they bowed their head in the benediction, he took out a I think it was a nine nine or forty five or something like that and shot Clem in the neck and went around the room and shot others while Clym's wife and daughter were in the pastor's office. So, if there is to be a death penalty, I think that Dylan Ruth fits that metric. And so Kate Ba would ask me this one day before I was signed to CNN.
I was just outside doing interviews everywhere. I was sweating in the Charleston heat. I'm drenching through my shirt and she asked me about the death penalty for Dylan Roof.
And it was literally the only time on camera Andrew that I was like, I was like damn near stuttering, like I just I could not my thoughts and my words they didn't match, they weren't there, and I couldn't quite grasp or understand the concept of how you know if there is a death penalty, it has to be for him, should there be a death penalty, And when somebody takes somebody close to you, it's one thing to be like if somebody ran in your house and raped
your daughter and killed your wife, you know you would be for the death penalty then, But it's so esoterical, like that's not going to happen to me. But then somebody walks into church and murders your good friend, along with others with like the angels of us on a Wednesday night Bible study, type of angelic type of individuals, the Abraham Lincoln, the better angels of our nature. It literally makes you question the policy, and so I don't know the answer. I also know I'm not all the
way there in my faith journey. He as we say downside, he ain't done with me yet. Maybe I will never have an answer. But this is for me, which is why I'm glad we're talking about it. This is for me, probably the most conflicting public policy ideal that we have to go through.
Mmm. I feel you know, I feel you be on the on the conflict because I always think man what if it were something that you know, I knew. I knew Clem as well, and he was a member of a network that I started nationally and very active there. I been in close proximity to, you know, to really heinous.
So it's of situations where I'm just like, man if I get my hands on And then of course you're reminded that's exactly why our jurisprudence system looks the way it looks, so that I can't be the one who decides the consequence for the person who takes whatever action.
And then I read some of the stories and I spend a lot of time doing this during my race for governor, Stories of families who thought they would feel better after seeing the person who did whatever the heinous crime was against their family member or loved one, and basically still reflecting on this sense of emptiness, reflecting that they're glad that the person no longer draws breath, but also saying it didn't it doesn't bring my loved one back. I don't feel I don't feel better by it. I
don't feel healed and foreclosed any kind of way. And then you start to think, what's the best opportunity for that person to come to regret and to come to the place where they want to participate in a more restorative process after you've done such a heinous thing, and I think their ability to still have to reckon with that and not so quickly being excused. And when I say excused, basically you know you're taking out when you die.
You know there's no more growth, there's no more evolution so far as I know, on this earth, by which you can become a testament for other people as to why this isn't the thing to do. You don't go that route. And then when you look and you see that black folks, black men particularly, but black folks are like what make up more than half those on death
row and we're thirteen percent of the US population. The application of that law, so we already have the hurdle before a criminal justice system, but then once in it, we're so we got so much stacked against us that we're not given the benefit of the doubt on anything.
So we're literally you know, I.
Said this my attorneys when I was going through my case, like, well, we at least we have the truth on our side. That's what we're going to win on. We have the truth, and one of my one of the council said, unfortunately, there are a lot of people who told the truth who were innocent that are unfortunately behind bars.
Correct, So the truth isn't enough.
It's not. The truth is not an absolute defense and it should not.
At all, not at all and far from it where you consider people who told the truth, steal were found guilty, are behind bars and worse over if they find themselves in a capital case with a sentence of of of the death penalty.
So I'm pretty olfish? Am I selfish? From my policy perspective or policy because.
One of us you are like every one of us. The difference is every one of us don't have to reckon with the public policy implications of how we feel about the thing. Electives do and they're called to higher purpose and so they do have to reckon with all the dimensions of this. But no, you're no different than how the rest of us I think and knee jerk think about it.
You get conflicted, especially when it's people you care about, or there are people who have traditionally been harmed. We come from a long legacy of people who were lynched
for their entertainment, you know, what I mean. And so when that when you consider what we just you know, bear as markers on our DNA, and what that means in terms of being a public spectacle oftentimes for things that our people did not do or in some rare instances it you know, they were punished for a crime, and that punishment did not at all match whatever alleged crime it was. And so when you think about that, I think, for me, I never want to be a
part of doing that to someone else. But there are moments where and I'll just be honest with y'all. You know, my dad was in the hospital last week, of course, that's why I missed you guys in Atlanta. And when a cardiologist came in to talk to my dad about what the path was going to be when he was discharged, you know, he starts having this conversation with us in a really flippant way. And you know, when you're thinking about you guys, know this for your parents and for
your children. Now this we're talking about his actual physical heart. You can't be flippant. You can't tell me that you don't have time because you have thirty other patients. You can't tell me that he I asked him if I could record the conversation because we were going to play it for a friend of the family who's a cardiologist. And he told me no and stormed out the room and came back. And I'm seeing red at this point.
So you're talking like, in those moments where you're feeling the most protective of your folks, you want to harm someone, like, how dare you? I just wanted to show I didn't want to take him out, but I did want to, you know, snatch him. So what I did do is go to the peacemaker in our family, my mom. I dove right in my mom's arms as light as she is right now, one hundred pounds, soaking wet, and just
grabbed her and she hugged me. Ca I'm crying because I'm livid, and I'm just saying, there are these moments where, even when people make really bad decisions, it's one decision that separates us from our neighbor. Should you be punished to the point where you can, you're no longer even given the opportunity to rehabilitate or restore or repent because you made a decision in a split second, whether it's cutting somebody off on the freeway or shooting a tire
out or worse. I just don't know that I want to make that decision, you know, Like I make bad decisions every day. Hopefully my good outweighs my bad, but bad decisions every day, and in that moment, I really was like, this dude could get choked.
But that's not But the death pondity is that the death pnity is. And I'm no advocate for it and advocate halfway advocate.
But you know the crazy thing is that that that they always say I'm I'm a devil's advocate, and I'm like, if there's one nigga that don't need an advocate.
It's yeah.
But you know, when you think about it, you have a system of jurisprudence and a crazy part about it. As I'm thinking this through and saying it out loud, you know, people still get it wrong. Even though the death penality goes through all of these iterations. I mean, when you're talking about the death penalty certified crime, think
about from arrest to investigation. Usually three years after the arrest, if not longer, you go to trial, right and you have to have a death penalty certified lawyer, which is the upper echelne of the criminal defense bar. They have to get extra training, extra legal hours. Then you have exhaustive appeals, you have your own PCR, you have a
direct appeal that goes through different levels. Then you have the ability to get clemency, which is like the last ditch effort from which just means you go from death penalty to life right, life without parole. So there are a lot of steps there, and usually the people who are on death row are not there for a crime
out of happenstance. It's not as if you just accidentally did something or acted in a heat of as they say, like if you're walking on your loved one doing it doing somebody else and you kill them, that's a heat of a passion.
But you admit there are other mitigators. Yeah, there are mitigators that don't get applied to indubitably, Ye, indubitably yeah, and so the so then the the other thing is is that usually these appeals are based off of whatever the underlying set of facts are, so the underlying.
Set effects don't change.
It's a process. It's sort of question that is argued on appeals. So if the eyewitness was half blind, and by the way, more than half eyewitnesses are wrong in their accounts, are wrong in their accounts, but are yet still put on stands, and so they're part of the underlying set of facts that don't get questioned in the in the course of a of an appeal, don't stay the same. The person may have all these years of appeals and options in clemency, but if they were wrong at jump, they're wrong all.
The way through.
And that part ever, you know, really ever gets lifted right, that it's really ever this case that we saw and what was that Alabama where k Ivy for the first time in the state's history and some number of years overturned on clemency at the very end granted it. And because these people had to go out there, they had to have somebody come out and confess to having done the thing. And then thanks to the updated in science, you know, they were able they could not place this
many of the thing. He had been declaring his innocence the whole time. So they essentially had a whole case worked up for the person who actually did it. And then there's the guy who was about to be killed for it. And they're not the same people. So it's I mean, it's just this overwhelming, you know, public outcry that got k Ivy to do the right thing eventually.
But in states like Texas where the governor parades himself around at the number of death penalties they can get in the course of year, man, please, I wouldn't trust the chances for the truth in that state for nothing, and you shouldn't.
James brown Ax again, his cousin confessed to the crime. He faced an all white jury. There are all kinds of factors that exist. There's according to the dat white jury, yeah, mostly white jury. They they got rid of most of the black potential jurors in James Brodnax's case, and he raised it on the Supreme Court threw out two of the three appeals that he had. By the way, there's
a report from the Death Penalty Information Center. The report entitled Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States twenty twenty two, of thirty two hundred cases, black people were seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted. It says that fifty five percent of all death sentenced exgneries were black. Fifty five percent of wrongful murder convictions resulting in life
imprisonment were black. Four percent of wrongful murder convictions in which exogneries were sentenced to imprisonment for terms of years black. And so when you think about you know, it's literally despite our as you said earlier, Andrew, despite the representation, the demographic representation we have in this country, it is by far, it by far exceeds. And for me, that's enough not to support the death penalty. That is just enough. And you know, we're not just wrongfully convicted of murder.
We're also wrongfully incarcerated often. And so I just I don't I don't trust a justice system withholding us for life. I certainly don't trust the justice or the injustice system with taking our lives. I just don't. And you know, in the moment we're talking about this, Donald Trump's Department of Justice is talking about bringing back firing squads as a form of capital punishment.
I agree, we already are. We already have firing squads in South Carolina. They brought them back federally, brought them federal That's what that's the crazy thing about it. I mean, it's just yeah, it's just the wild way, and you know, all the all the all the calls don't even work.
That's also to most of your point. Angela.
Sorry, I gotta go, y'all. They called me downstairs. I gotta go give Vince's cake. Shout out to Vince Evans.
But I wish how do we get the mute Angela like that more often?
Nick?
Can we.
Phone rings?
You know, welcome home muter again turn themselves off?
We actually have a conversation going. Maybe we can have a town hall on this. Seriously, I think this capital punishment conversation at a.
Add to the add to the notes, Add to the notes.
Please wherever people can sign up to to sign on to a petition for mister Brown next.
Yes, thank you, sure well. Welcome home y'all.
You know struggle.
After you talked about fam you not being able to pronounce that you stumbled Joe way all the way through that Supreme Court. Just opinion, Lord, have.
Mercy, God's I read it well?
No less of viewers decide.
Love y'all by.
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