NEW VOICES: Urban League President Says Death Penalty is ​“Cruel and Inhuman”

In a recent col­umn, Marc H. Morial, the cur­rent President of the National Urban League and for­mer President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, praised recent efforts to halt exe­cu­tions while ques­tions about inno­cence and fair­ness are addressed by leg­is­la­tors. Morial noted: 

There are grow­ing calls for mora­to­ria on exe­cu­tions, a grow­ing reluc­tance among juries to levy the death penal­ty, efforts to insure that defen­dants in cap­i­tal cas­es, who are most often poor, are rep­re­sent­ed by good attor­neys, and even leg­isla­tive attempts at the state and fed­er­al lev­els to fix the flaws in var­i­ous parts of the steps of death-penal­ty cas­es.
These efforts are worth­while – in our view, both for their prac­ti­cal­i­ty and for their under­scor­ing the moral argu­ments against the death penal­ty: It is a prac­tice that can­not be fixed by the appli­ca­tion of ​“prac­ti­cal” mea­sures. It is inher­ent­ly cru­el and inhu­man pun­ish­ment, in no small mea­sure because it is lay­ered through and through with America’s lega­cy of class and racial oppression.

(MaximsNews​.com, February 25, 2004)(emphasis added) See New Voices.