Gemenos, July 3, 2009

Dear President Obama,

I am a French national, but today it's as a world citizen that I am writing you, in order to convey my profound respect and gratitude for your courage and determination in helping society, mired in old dead-end ways, to move forward.

It's also as a world citizen and an activist in various international organizations that I would like to bring up an issue I care deeply about : the death penalty. As you know, while the number of nations still imposing capital punishment is ever dwindling, your country is the last of the Western democracies to apply it today. And it does so on a considerable scale, since over 60 people have been put to death in the last 12 months. Thanks to the media, the whole world is watching and wondering how it comes about that America, this great democracy that prides itself on its fundamental principles of justice, freedom, equality and the rule of law, this nation that keeps a watchful eye on other countries' human rights records, should be so much in contradiction with its own values.

Several bills, including Senator Feingold's one, which I found most inspiring, have proposed the repeal of the death penalty since its return in 1976, but none have succeeded in federal law, although New Jersey and New Mexico have done so in state law. Yet, as you must know, the deterrent value of capital punishment is a myth; its lack of effect on the crime rate has been demonstrated in study after study. Many states have calculated its tremendous cost, over and above that of alternative solutions, sums that would surely be better employed in the prevention of crime and delinquency.

As a lawyer you understand that justice can never be infallible. No country can truly claim to apply the death penalty in a just and even-handed way. Harry Blackman, United States Supreme Court Justice from 1970 to 1994, finally declared his opposition to capital punishment in 1994 in these words: "I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed . . . The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution."

We are talking here about an irreversible punishment! And we cannot ignore the fact that a considerable number of innocents have indeed been sentenced to death. The death penalty is unique in that, once carried out, it cannot be reversed. What can we say about the dreadful injustice that can sentence people to death for crimes they have not committed, and leave them for years, or tens of years, on those wretched and inhumane death rows until the time comes to take their lives in the name of justice?

Finally, as an African-American lawyer, you are well aware of the racial prejudice tainting your penal system and sometimes presiding over the application of the death penalty. Your country has come a long way in dismantling the social racism that prevailed in the states; your accession to the Presidency bears witness to that. But there remain numerous vestiges of an institutional racism flagrantly affecting minorities.

The question I venture to put to you today, Mr President, is: « Why keep the death penalty?».

Are you ready to admit that capital punishment has an eminently political function?

First of all because it represents the sovereign power of the state, the power of life and death over its citizens. It affirms a notion of total power. Keeping it in the judicial arsenal allows us to say: "We are ready to use any means to fight crime". But what kind of a policy is that? Responding to violence with violence, to death with death, is no sign of a mature society. A century and a half ago, Victor Hugo, one of the greatest authors in the French language and a committed intellectual, declared: «Choosing the death penalty means choosing the past and fear, rather than the future and hope. Abolishing it means that we make a great step for civilization, placing ourselves above the rules of primitive vengeance».

In rejecting capital punishment, we proclaim that the life of all human beings is sacred. I know, for having visited them several times, that the death rows are not full of bloodthirsty monsters.

Before being a murderer, the condemned man is above all a human being like you and me. And before they were adults, these prisoners were innocent children, later often destroyed by life, children who had no other space to grow up in than a world of violence. What calvary did the mothers of these children, their families, go through? All too often, we would rather not know.

Secondly because the death penalty offers a popular argument at election time. It is claimed that the majority of Americans are in favour of capital punishment, a claim so often repeated that everyone gets to believe it. But in what terms is the question posed, to get such a response? Do you not honestly believe that if alternative sentences were proposed in an intelligent way, most Americans would prefer life or LWOP, with some compensation for the victim's family, to death? Various polls appear to show that that is the case.

It is true that for many people the argument for a death penalty stems from a phenomenon of identification with the victim's family. This gives rise to a death impulse, an instinctive human reaction. « For capital punishment satisfies this death instinct polarized on the murderer, whom we abhor and fear at the same time, no doubt because he is one of our own faces » as Robert Badinter, fervent French abolitionist who became minister of justice in 1981, put it so well.

All the same we cannot worthily support a penalty that makes more victims and perpetuates the cycle of violence and revenge.

Mr President, I beseech you, with all my heart and soul, to put aside this culture of violence and restore integrity to your judicial/penal system. Where would your country be now, if the members of congress had followed public opinion instead of guiding it? You might still have slavery, segregation, and no voting rights for women. Society's role is not to punish for the sake of vengeance, but to correct, as far as possible, what needs to be improved. Should not Society seek first of all to identify and prevent the causes of crime, to re-balance situations that are hot-beds of violence and chaos? Should it not educate, enlighten, nurture, open up all our consciences so as to move humanity forward and create peace and harmony among us all?

However, when a state executes someone, it teaches the younger generation that accounts are to be settled by violence, even if that includes the sacrifice of human life.

At this start of a new millennium our models for society are far from being entirely just. There's still a long way to go. But your great nation's stubborn practice of legal murder casts a sad light on humankind today. July 2, 2009, has just marked the passage of 33 years since the Supreme Court re-instated the death penalty through the Gregg v. Georgia decision. And since 1976, the united States have executed over 1160 people. It's time to open a new chapter in the great book of human memory and to give everyone the opportunity to open his heart and let his conscience do the talking. This is certain, that the day will come when it will be said in wonderment: « Once upon a time in this great country, crime was punished by another crime!»

I invite your conscience Mr President, to join with those of spiritual leaders, and of humanitarian associations the world over, and I urge you, with all the patience, perseverance, intelligence and courage you possess, to invest your charge with the strength and capacity it will take to leave way behind you this sorry and archaic practice. As you affirmed in your speech to Congress last February 24: «Living our values doesn't make us weaker. It makes us safer, and it makes us stronger».

This invitation is not Utopian. You represent an immense hope for millions of American citizens, and no doubt for billions of citizens worldwide. Mr Obama, may you be the president during whose historical mandate capital punishment will disappear from the United States of America. You can do it!_

Thank you very much for your attention. I hope you will find time to reply.

May God bless you and keep you, Mr President.

Respectfully yours,

Clotilde Nougaret