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Spied on by the Maryland police
Mike Stark, a national board member of the Campaign to End the Death
Penalty (CEDP), was one of many targets of a Maryland State Police
investigation into anti-death penalty and antiwar activism.
July 21, 2008
WHEN I received a voice mail last Wednesday from the Maryland ACLU, I
assumed it was about the fight against Maryland's death penalty.
Executions in Maryland have been shut down since 2006, and the state's
General Assembly has authorized a commission to make recommendations on
the future of capital punishment. The commission's plans are the topic
of constant conversation among abolitionists.
It turns out the ACLU call was about the death penalty, but not exactly
in the form I was expecting.
When I called back, ACLU staff attorney David Rocah explained that my
name had appeared repeatedly in a 46-page re****t do***enting a
clandestine surveillance and undercover investigation conducted by the
Maryland State Police for more than a year, from March 2005 to May 2006.
The re****t was released to the ACLU after it sued the Maryland state
police for refusing to disclose information-gathering activities aimed
at peace activists. "Detailed intelligence re****ts logged by at least
two agents in the police department's Homeland Security and Intelligence
Division reveal close monitoring of the movements as the Iraq war and
capital punishment were heatedly debated in 2005 and 2006," the
Wa****ngton Post re****ted.
"Organizational meetings, public forums, prison vigils, rallies outside
the State House in Annapolis and e-mail group lists were infiltrated by
police posing as peace activists and death penalty opponents, the
records show. The surveillance continued even though the logs contained
no re****ts of illegal activity and consistently indicated that the
activists were not planning violent protests."
The infiltration of the CEDP was carried out during the one-term reign
of former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich, who ended the moratorium on
executions that had been imposed by his predecessor when the flaws in
the death penalty system became impossible to overlook.
The surveillance began after the first execution overseen by Ehrlich--of
Steven Oken in 2004--and continued during the CEDP's campaigns to save
Wesley Baker, who was put to death in December 2005, and Vernon Evans,
who won a last-minute stay of execution in February 2006.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
HEARING THE news, I thought it was a bad joke. Undercover cops
investigating public meetings of civil and human rights activists
against the death penalty? Police infiltration of discussions held at
the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee hall?
My first reading of the surveillance re****t reinforced this response. It
was full of factual errors, botched names and mistaken identities and
associations. According to the re****t, the "national socialists" (i.e.,
Nazis) were organizing against racial bias in Maryland's death penalty.
Not just wrong, but a dumb kind of wrong.
The re****t ludicrously described one well-respected activist and ardent
pacifist, Max Obuszewski, as a "terrorist." As for me, they couldn't
figure out if I was an anarchist or socialist.
Their confusion on this last point is at least somewhat understandable
since we have people from a wide variety of political and religious
affiliations who come together to oppose capital punishment. But in the
event the Maryland police are still wondering, in the proud tradition of
anti-death penalty attorney Clarence Darrow, I'm a socialist.
The re****t does get one thing right. Nowhere in the 46 single-spaced
pages is a single illegal activity conducted by anti-death penalty
activists (observed or imagined) described. Not a single statement,
note, e-mail or comment made publicly or illegally obtained through
surveillance can be construed as illegal, improper or even rude.
Instead, the list of events do***ented in the re****t--distributing
fliers, petitioning--are about as scandalous as the minutes of a local
Rotary club.
I've read enough history to know something of the long and sordid story
of these kinds of spy operations in the U.S. I've also attended events
in sup****t of imprisoned activists, such as Leonard Peltier, Mumia
Abu-Jamal and Maryland's own Eddie Conway, who have paid a terrible
price when paranoid policing takes hold.
The surveillance of the CEDP and antiwar activists seems ludicrous by
comparison, especially with the ineptitude of the Maryland cops ****ning
through on every page.
But this kind of inanity is dangerous--to the lives and livelihoods of
the people who are subjected to it, and to the constitutionally
guaranteed rights of free speech, assembly and petition of grievances of
everyone.
And it's there that the joke stops. Because sending cops into activist
meetings on college campuses, community centers and Quaker meeting halls
to write down lists of names and the activities of the participants can
only be described as one thing: state repression.
Any state-organized act designed to prevent or disrupt the efforts of
ordinary people to effect change must be vigorously opposed and
organized against, to stop similar acts from occurring again. The
current governor of Maryland, Martin O'Malley, has assured the public
that the surveillance has stopped. This is a first step, but until the
laws are changed and the responsible parties publicly brought to account
for treading on our liberties, it's not enough.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ANTI-DEATH penalty author and activist Sister Helen Prejean once
counseled activists that "sup****t for the death penalty may be a mile
wide, but it's an inch deep." She meant that while many people sup****t
capital punishment in the abstract, their sup****t is based on
misinformation and is easily turned when faced with the facts.
Prejean is right. The more light that is shown on this archaic and
barbaric practice, the more it loses its hold. My own experience has
shown me time and again that a five-minute conversation with even the
most ardent death penalty sup****ter can often turn someone from a
booster to a critic. Those conversations have helped turn the tide of
public opinion away from sup****t for the death penalty.
Nowhere has this been clearer than my home state of Maryland, where by
every indication, capital punishment is on its way out. A moratorium on
executions (the second halt in executions since 1999) has been in place
since 2006. The number of people on death row has shrunk from 17
prisoners in 1998 to only five; new capital prosecutions and convictions
are down; and sup****t for the death penalty remains on the decline.
Perhaps that's why a shrill and die-hard sup****ter of the death penalty
like Ehrlich and his team decided it was necessary to send undercover
agents and surveillance vans to our meetings. Ehrlich came into the
governor's mansion in 2003 determined to restart executions in Maryland,
and he discovered that it was necessary to resort to underhanded tactics
and dirty tricks to prop up the tottering house of cards.
As CEDP National Director Marlene Martin put it, "How incredible it is
that the Maryland state police wasted money to spy on a group of folks
trying to stop the execution of a poor Black prisoner. But then again, I
guess the little people, Black and white, coming together to fight
against a blatant, unfair and racist barbaric practice like capital
punishment, has always scared those in power who want to maintain an
unfair and unequal society."
In the Maryland police re****t, alongside the names of long-time
anti-death penalty activists, there's a special focus on the activities
of the family of death row prisoner Vernon Evans.
According to the logic of the re****t, the Evans family represented a
unique kind of threat--because of the power of their personal efforts to
stop the state from killing their son, brother, cousin and father, and
because of how broadly their story of pain, redemption and hope
resonates in an often beaten-down city like Baltimore.
Their voices are a powerful antidote to the politics of fear and revenge
practiced by death penalty sup****ters. They are precious to our movement
against the death penalty and to build a better world, and we have to
defend them.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
What you can do
If you want to express your outrage at the surveillance of Maryland
activists, contact the office of the current Maryland Gov. Martin
O'Malley and demand a full investigation of the Maryland State Police,
the public release of all do***ents obtained through its illegal
activities and a specific commitment that the anti-death penalty and
antiwar movements will not be targeted again. Call 800-811-8336, or
submit a comment online [1].
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1. [1] http://www.governor.maryland.gov/mail
2. [2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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