Date: 21 Feb 97 02:58:08 EST
From: Chris Burford <100423.2040-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: Bourgeois and socialist legality


The headlines in England this morning are about the latest
dramatic blow to the reputation of British justice. 3 men who 
have spent coming up nineteen years in prison for the murder of 
newspaper boy, Carl Bridgewater, are to be released today and 
will receive compensation. New scientific analysis of the 
police evidence shows that a confession by one man was forged
which was almost certainly used to trick a fourth man who died of natural 
causes in prison. 
The picture is consistent with his claim before he died that
his confession was beaten out of him, and all four were convicted 
on it.



I want to make two points:

1) leftwingers in England/Britain view with alarm the spread of 
the death penalty in the USA over the last 20 years. At least 3 
of the four wrongfully convicted men are alive to be released.
Other dramatic cases in England over the last few years make 
the return of the death penalty impossible. What with the overturning 
of the conviction of the "Guildford Four"
and the "Birmingham Six" for the deaths caused by IRA bombs, this 
brings to a total of at least 14 innocent people who would have 
been executed had we had the death penalty.

I would like to ask US subscribers what is being done to 
turn the tide against the death penalty in the USA which must be 
responsble for the deaths of scores of innocent people, a 
disproportionate number of whom are black, and working class.

Is anyone following the James Earl Ray reinvestigation?



2) I think as we sum up the 20th century, we have to say that
all political systems, socialist as well as capitalist, can 
beat, torture and kill innocent prisoners, and can do so in 
sizable numbers when there are not careful checks on how the 
system operates. Sometimes the worst excesses occur when the people
with the power are totally sure of the moral strength of their own 
position. 

Some of the historical re-analysis has to discuss 
whether there is a "socialist legality" which gets
overlooked in the earlier years of a revolution. Is this 
indistinguishable in practice from the bourgeois right
of civil society and is it the start of slippery slope back to 
capitalism? Or can there be a socialist legality coupled 
with a (people's democratic) dictatorship of the proletariat? 
 


Chris Burford
London.


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