Post by DaveParkinson on May 4, 2005 21:53:03 GMT -5
Hi There !
I've been here since day one as half of CCADP, but decided to log in seperately to occasionally throw in my 2 cents worth...(...When I'm not busy updating the website, not to mention a myriad of other things !).
This forum has been up almost 2 weeks now and already nearly 100 people have joined ! We expect this number to grow substantially over the next few months, years...
I come from a background of social justice activism, and work with the local riding association of a political party here in Scarborough (Toronto suburb). I used to do work on air and behind the scenes at CIUT 89.5 FM, U of Toronto radio station and worked on a news and information program dealing with local social justice issues when I married Tracy Lamourie back in 1994.
Without getting into too much detail, with all we've seen in our working against racism, poverty, police/court/prison abuses, and injustices in general we we're automatically motivated to get involved in the fight against the death penalty when we realized it was a culmation of all the issues we we're concerned about.
One night in early 1998, we we're surfing the web for something unrelated when we accidentally stumbled upon
Cyberspace Inmates a webpage with prisoner pen pal requests... We came across a few death row prisoners pen pal ads and then one of these guys was asking for help, he said he was really innocent... He didn't seem to want a pen pal, he wanted help, and this was the only way he could find to get the word to the outside world that an innocent man was sitting locked up somewhere in Pennsylvania for a crime he didn't commit and he was going to die if somebody didn't do something.
Needless to say we were disturbed. We'd never seen anything like this before... Death row prisoners crying out for help on some obscure prisoner pen pal page...
Was this for real ? We thought there may be a couple hundred serial killer rapists and such, but we didn't know much about the issue. A few years earlier we'd heard of Mumia Abu Jamal, death row journalist and author because we announced stuff on our radio show about him, but this was all new to us...
Was this for real ? We had to know for the next few days we couldn't get it out of our heads, we had to know, we had to help !
We ended up writing to Mr. James A. Dennis the prisoner whose pen pal posting alerted us to this issue, and received more than adequate evidence to support his innocence claims.
I'd been fooling around with making webpages, we decided to make a webpage for Jimmy Dennis thinking if we were alerted by a small pen pal request, we could alert a lot more people, and provide a forum where he could post all his evidence online for the whole world to see...
We continued investigating the issue of capital punishment and were disturbed to find thousands not hundreds on death rows as we thought, many for crimes that in many cases only seemed to warrant a life sentence. Being Canadian and never having the Death penalty in practice in my lifetime, It's just a "No Brainer" for me... The State/Government just isn't supposed to kill it's citizens... Killing to show killing is wrong ? No...
There's just no argument there that's rational and not based on ones anger/hatred of the crime itself.
Anyway I'm rambling on and on, but lets just say we decided to contact as many prisoners as we could find at the time to let them post their information online like we did for Jimmy Dennis so the world can see the reality of what's going on in America's death camps.
In May 1998 The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty was born and the rest is history...
Sorry for such a long intro...
It's past my bedtime, eh...
I've been here since day one as half of CCADP, but decided to log in seperately to occasionally throw in my 2 cents worth...(...When I'm not busy updating the website, not to mention a myriad of other things !).
This forum has been up almost 2 weeks now and already nearly 100 people have joined ! We expect this number to grow substantially over the next few months, years...
I come from a background of social justice activism, and work with the local riding association of a political party here in Scarborough (Toronto suburb). I used to do work on air and behind the scenes at CIUT 89.5 FM, U of Toronto radio station and worked on a news and information program dealing with local social justice issues when I married Tracy Lamourie back in 1994.
Without getting into too much detail, with all we've seen in our working against racism, poverty, police/court/prison abuses, and injustices in general we we're automatically motivated to get involved in the fight against the death penalty when we realized it was a culmation of all the issues we we're concerned about.
One night in early 1998, we we're surfing the web for something unrelated when we accidentally stumbled upon
Cyberspace Inmates a webpage with prisoner pen pal requests... We came across a few death row prisoners pen pal ads and then one of these guys was asking for help, he said he was really innocent... He didn't seem to want a pen pal, he wanted help, and this was the only way he could find to get the word to the outside world that an innocent man was sitting locked up somewhere in Pennsylvania for a crime he didn't commit and he was going to die if somebody didn't do something.
Needless to say we were disturbed. We'd never seen anything like this before... Death row prisoners crying out for help on some obscure prisoner pen pal page...
Was this for real ? We thought there may be a couple hundred serial killer rapists and such, but we didn't know much about the issue. A few years earlier we'd heard of Mumia Abu Jamal, death row journalist and author because we announced stuff on our radio show about him, but this was all new to us...
Was this for real ? We had to know for the next few days we couldn't get it out of our heads, we had to know, we had to help !
We ended up writing to Mr. James A. Dennis the prisoner whose pen pal posting alerted us to this issue, and received more than adequate evidence to support his innocence claims.
I'd been fooling around with making webpages, we decided to make a webpage for Jimmy Dennis thinking if we were alerted by a small pen pal request, we could alert a lot more people, and provide a forum where he could post all his evidence online for the whole world to see...
We continued investigating the issue of capital punishment and were disturbed to find thousands not hundreds on death rows as we thought, many for crimes that in many cases only seemed to warrant a life sentence. Being Canadian and never having the Death penalty in practice in my lifetime, It's just a "No Brainer" for me... The State/Government just isn't supposed to kill it's citizens... Killing to show killing is wrong ? No...
There's just no argument there that's rational and not based on ones anger/hatred of the crime itself.
Anyway I'm rambling on and on, but lets just say we decided to contact as many prisoners as we could find at the time to let them post their information online like we did for Jimmy Dennis so the world can see the reality of what's going on in America's death camps.
In May 1998 The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty was born and the rest is history...
Sorry for such a long intro...
It's past my bedtime, eh...
