Maryland's Shame
On Seeing Wesley Baker Die
By DAVE ZIRIN and MIKE STARK
No, we weren't in the room. We didn't see the technicians spread and shackle his arms. We didn't see the priest lightly graze Wesley's cheek and whisper in his ear. We didn't hear his "five or six rasping breaths" before his heart stopped. We weren't there earlier when Wesley ate his last meal, breaded fish, green beans, bread, fruit punch and milk. We weren't witness to an execution that had more in common with a lynching than anything resembling justice.
We were right outside, shivering in the lightly falling snow. We were joined by roughly fifty others, including Wesley's mother Delores who also couldn't stop trembling, but not from the snow as her quiet sobs revealed. Delores is no stranger to seeing her children die. She already had buried two other sons, swallowed whole by violence. Now the state of Maryland would snuff out a third. In an earlier interview with the press she stated, "I understand the
family, the suffering they have been through. I just don't want to lose my son. I think I've had my share."
It's horribly ironic that the state of Maryland was finally at full attention of the existence of Wesley Baker only after he was convicted of murder. The state could not be bothered when Wesley was conceived, after Delores was raped at age 13. They didn't have any kind of intervention when Wesley was sexually abused at age five and homeless on the streets at age eight sleeping in abandoned cars and motel bathrooms. The state was nowhere to be found when Wesley was repeatedly hospitalized as a child for stab wounds, eye injuries, and nose injuries that required surgery. Maryland officials were nowhere to be found when Wesley suffered his first drug overdose at the age of 12.
Governor Robert Ehrlich, a chilling man born without compassion for anything but his rabid base, said that looking at Wesley's life there were no "mitigating factors." In that respect, it was fitting that we stood together in the shadow of Baltimore's high-tech, 250-million dollar SuperMax prison as Wesley died. This is the city that can build prisons and two publicly funded stadiums while there is no money to actually intervene in the lives of people like Wesley Baker.
http://www.counterpunch.org/zirin12092005.html
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