Civil rights attorney Furonda Brasfield joined Karen Hunter on SiriusXM Urban View to discuss her work with the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the racial inequities she says are built into capital punishment.
Brasfield, the organization’s director of leadership development, told Hunter she has spent more than a decade working as a death penalty abolitionist. She began with the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty while attending law school.
“I learned that the death penalty is really lynching. It’s just sanitized,” Brasfield told Hunter. “It kills innocent people.”
Brasfield went on to state that Black defendants in Arkansas are more than twice as likely to receive the death penalty for a capital crime than white defendants accused of the same offense.
“The color of your skin can mean life or death,” Brasfield said. “And that’s not right.”
Hunter noted that incarcerated people are often demonized to the point that the public accepts whatever happens to them. She connected the modern death penalty system to the history of racial violence against Black Americans.
Brasfield said her commitment grew after hearing from one of the West Memphis Three, who spent years on Arkansas’ death row before accepting an Alford plea.
“Seeing this man before me, almost blind due to the conditions that he had suffered on death row, and he was totally innocent, that was the catalyst,” she said.
Brasfield characterized the death penalty as “the tip of the spear” within the criminal legal system and said the work requires solidarity, prayer and rest.
“You lean on your comrades,” she said. “You just got to rest too.”
Brasfield encouraged listeners to visit enddeathpenalty.org and follow the campaign’s Noose to Needle project, which examines the connection between racial terror lynching and the modern death penalty.
“We will make sure that you get connected with the groups that are doing the work,” she added.
Watch the full clip below.
