For days after Tennessee botched her execution by lethal injection on September 30, Christa Pike lay unconscious, intubated, shackled to a hospital bed with severe burns. When the prison pumped her full of poison, she exclaimed: "My arm feels like it's about to burst open."� This travesty follows the botched execution last May of another Tennessee inmate, Tony Carruthers. It only goes to prove once again that capital punishment is cruel and inhumane and must be abolished.

Christa is a white woman, but the death penalty in racist America is a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the lynch rope made legal. The majority on death row now are people of color. Half of Tennessee's death row inmates are black. Nearly a third of the death sentences there are handed down in majority black Shelby County (Memphis).

Capital punishment is the ultimate weapon in the government's arsenal of repression. The speedup on death row goes hand in hand with rampaging ICE raids and escalating racist cop terror in the streets. Repression rains down heavily on those who protest government policy. It will be wielded against workers and the oppressed who fight to better their livelihoods.

There is a long history of state-sanctioned murders of fighters for the working class and oppressed: the Haymarket Martyrs (1887), Joe Hill (1915), Sacco & Vanzetti (1927), the Rosenbergs (1953). Political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal spent 29 years on death row, explicitly sentenced to death because of his history as a former Black Panther. Today this innocent man is on the "slow death row" of life without parole.

In total, over 200 people sentenced to death in the US in the past 50 years were later shown to be innocent. We say: Enough! It is in the interest of all workers and the oppressed to fight to abolish the racist death penalty!