Save the life of Reginald Blanton, sentenced to death in Texas due to racial prejudice

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To: U.S. Government; U.S. Congress; U.S. Senate; U.S. Department of Justice; State Bar of Texas; Texas Governor; Senator Barack Obama; UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; members of the Radical Transnational Party; Democratic Nations

Petition to save the life of Reginald Blanton, sentenced to death in Texas due to racial prejudice

A case that demonstrates the injustice of the death penalty, which must be abolished, starting from the United States of America

by EveryOne Group

www.everyonegroup.com

info@everyonegroup.com

+39 334 8429527

A sentence issued without proof of guilt in a climate of intolerance

Reginald Blanton, aged 27, an African American, originally from California, has been in jail for the last 9 years (7 on Death Row) accused of having killed –when he was 18 – his close friend Carlos Garza for reasons connected to drug possession and pushing. EveryOne Group has decided to promote an international campaign in the attempt to save Reginald’s life.

“We are convinced the inquiry and trial that led to Reginald being sentenced to death reveal an abuse of the law, errors of form and procedural flaws” say Roberto Malini, Matteo Pegoraro and Dario Picciau, leaders of Everyone.

Reginald is African American, he was a street kid and a member of a gang. He belonged to a world that the US institutions, and Texas in particular, fight with such rigour it often becomes prejudice.

We suspect the verdict contains elements of racial discrimination and this is confirmed by the fact that Reginald Blanton was not judged, according to his constitutional rights, by a jury of his peers. The District Attorney also arranged it so that the entire jury was made up of white Americans. And it is for this reason that the 5th Circuit of Appeal recognised this violation of his assurance of a fair trial”.

Reginald is presently an inmate on Death Row in Polunksy Prison, in Livingston, Texas. For the last seven years he has been attempting to prove his innocence (but most of all to show the level of inhumanity the inmates of Death Row are subjected to) through peaceful and non-violent protests - hunger strikes lasting weeks, articles given to his closest friends or his mother Anna, with whom the activists of EveryOne are in constant contact with. “We are convinced the US judicial system ( which still makes use of the death penalty) too often makes legal errors and procedural flaws”, continue the activists. “The law decides whether a human being should live or die with a margin of error that is inevitably high and often linked to social and personal bias, as well as to the inmate’s previous record and race. All this in defiance of article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We ask ourselves how many other innocent people will be put to death by the executioner before the death penalty is abolished and a respect of life is re-established”.

“We are able to demonstrate an incredible sequence of errors and violations of human rights in Reginald Blanton’s case”, say the activists, “but we also wish to reassert the need to promote, in all areas, the abolition of the death penalty.

Considering the impossibility, by both the police and judicial system, to prove the guilt “without the shadow of a doubt” of an accused person; considering the prejudice that is inevitably present in some members of a jury; considering we are talking about human beings subjected to cultural, instinctive and media influences; we believe that the medieval use of the death penalty (which severs the life of a human being) denies the people and the organizations the time to gather the necessary evidence for proving the inmate’s innocence through further investigations and deductions. Work that can often take many years, even decades.

No law should deny an inmate the chance of being rehabilitated, freed and even compensated, until the last day of his life on Earth. We must also consider that often the memory and information held by the prisoner is often indispensable for reaching a new and often more just verdict.”

To support the campaign to save Reginald Blanton’s life and to promote the abolition of the death penalty, sign the petition also at the following link:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/SaveReginald/

and send emails, postcards and letters to the following addresses:

Prison where Reginald Blanton is detained:

Polunsky Unit

3872 F.M. 350 South

Livingston, Tx 77351

Please specify in the letter/postcard: Reginald Blanton - #999395

Write to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice:

classify@tdcj.state.tx.us;

parole.div@tdcj.state.tx.us;

bpp-pio@tdcj.state.tx.us;

parole.pio@tdcj.state.tx.us,

Write to the Federal Bureau of Prisons of USA:

webmaster@bop.gov.

Write to the US Government:

http://answers.usa.gov/cgi-bin/gsa_ict.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php

Write to senator Barack Obama:

http://obama.senate.gov/contact/index.php

Write to the UN High Commissioneer for Human Rights:

InfoDesk@ohchr.org; niu@ohchr.org; gmagazzeni@ohchr.org; dexrel@ohchr.org

Write to the Radical Transnatonal Party:

radical.party@radicalparty.org

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE CAMPAIGN, PLEASE CONTACT:

EVERYONE GROUP

ONG based in Italy

www.everyonegroup.com

info@everyonegroup.com

+ 39 334 8429527

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