Dominique Green

I was watching a video on the Bill Moyers Journal that featured a man, Thomas Cahill, who spoke about the life and the death of a boy named Dominique Green. Dominique Green was born in 1974 to poor, abusive, alcoholic parents. His father was a drug addict and his mother was mentally ill. At a young age Dominique took his brother to a homeless shelter where they resided for some time in order to escape domestic abuse. When his mother threw Dominique and his brother out of their house at age 15, Dominique rented a storage shed where he and his brother lived and sold drugs to support themselves.

At 18, Dominique, along with three other men--two black men and one white man--allegedly robbed people at gun point which resulted in the death of Anthony Lastrapes. Though no evidence existed to suggest that Dominique pulled the trigger, the three men with Dominique testified against him at his trial at which point the state dropped the capital murder charges against them. The black men were sentenced to prison time while the white man was neither indicted or prosecuted.

I've come to realize that in America, it's not about values, rather it's about whose lives have value. And frankly, in America black lives just aren't worth as much as white lives. Perhaps that's why we can continue to give blacks life sentences and execute them for crimes they didn't commit and say "oops" afterwards; perhaps that's why a black baby born in our nation's capital is four times more likely to die than a baby born in an urban city in Asia; perhaps that's why our nation's infant mortality rate doubles that of Beijing (22% and 11% respectively); perhaps that's why California's three strikes law has given blacks life sentences for petty crimes and has failed to put away corporate gangsters who have been caught on numerous occasions dumping hundreds of metric tons of benzene into the air and water, stealing peoples' retirement funds, and exploiting Mexican workers so that they can continue to buy their cucumbers for 79 cents a pound; perhaps that's why our government says that crappy urban public schooling is a "state issue"; maybe that's why our schools remain more segregated and unequal now than they were during Jim Crow; perhaps that's why if you're black in America the system says "fuck you"; and maybe that explains why all of the people on death row are poor. China, which has a history of atrocious human rights abuses, neither executes minors nor the mentally insane; the United States does.

Dominique was executed at 7:59 in December of 2004. His final words were, "I have overcome a lot. I am not angry but I am disappointed that I was denied justice...Please keep the struggle going. I'm just sorry that I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be. But I guess it only hurts for a little while...Please keep my memory alive."