Last week, in a federal courtroom in New York City, a jury found Sayfullo Saipov guilty of intentionally driving a truck down a crowded lower Manhattan bike path, killing eight people and injuring several more. The crime was horrific — as a New Yorker, I was shocked by such a brazen and horrifying act of violence in my community and my heart broke for the families of the victims.

The jury’s decision virtually ensures that Saipov will be imprisoned for the rest of his life. The only question now is whether he will die in a prison of natural causes or be executed. If President Biden is going to keep his promise to eliminate the federal death penalty, his administration should announce it is no longer seeking death and stop the penalty trial.

During his presidential campaign, Biden pointed to America’s history of death-row exonerations and proclaimed: “Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death penalty.” He was right. Precisely because the capital punishment system is broken, we must end its practice for good, even where guilt is beyond dispute. Saipov provides a test case for whether Biden will keep his promise.

The death penalty in the United States is ridden with unfairness. Far too many people on death row have been exonerated, and of those, a disproportionate number are people of color. Of the 190 death row exonerees since 1973, 103 — or more than half — have been Black. As President Biden noted, that fact should give us pause. Even where guilt of the underlying crime is clear, whether a defendant is sentenced to death turns less on the gravity of their crime and more on the vagaries of geography, race, and legal assistance.

The Department of Justice understands this. As Attorney General Merrick Garland explained in a 2021 memorandum pausing federal executions, troubling questions swirl around the federal death penalty, “including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases.” But given those facts, why are Biden and Garland pursuing a death sentence against Saipov?

Decades of evidence show the death penalty has not made Americans safer, as it doesn’t deter violent crime. It has also made us an outlier among our international peers — the U.S. is the only advanced Western democracy that maintains capital punishment. When Congress authorized the federal death penalty in 1988, new death sentences were at their highest levels in modern history and public opinion polls measured death-penalty support at nearly 80 percent. But every year since then, death-row exonerations, botched and barbarically cruel executions, ubiquitous legal errors, and other inequities have led to a rising opposition to the death penalty.

Americans increasingly understand the problems with capital punishment, but those doubts won’t be reflected on the jury that will decide Saipov’s fate if the Justice Department proceeds. Because of the process of “death qualification” used to select the jury in Saipov’s case, those opposed to the death penalty are barred from serving on juries, resulting in juries that are more male, less diverse, more trustful of law enforcement, and more likely to vote for guilt in the first instance. The ACLU has brought challenges to death qualification in North Carolina, Florida, and Kansas.

American Civil Liberties Union

The Sinister and Racist Practice Infecting Death Penalty Juries | ACLU

“Death qualification” is yet another way prosecutors stack the odds against Black defendants and in favor of capital punishment.

Death sentences represent the views of an increasingly small and decidedly unrepresentative segment of the community, but the process for qualifying a jury in death penalty cases results in juries that are inevitably skewed and don’t represent broader public sentiment. And this is particularly concerning when a jury is selected in a state such as New York that has turned against the death penalty, having last executed a person in 1963 and abandoned the death penalty years ago.

As President Trump was leaving office, his administration carried out 13 executions in a span of six months. That killing spree illustrated why many Americans and a growing number of states have turned away from the death penalty. Among those executed in our name were two Black men who were not the triggermen in murders committed by others; two Black men with significant claims of intellectual disability; one member of the Navajo Nation; two men who were teenagers when they committed their crimes; and a mentally ill woman who had been repeatedly abused and tortured as a child, teen, and young woman.

Every federal death case has to be authorized by the attorney general. Understanding these flaws, Attorney General Garland deauthorized the death penalty in over two dozen cases in which the prior administration had sought death. Also to his credit, Garland declined to authorize any new death cases. That is, until Saipov.

Put simply: if the system is flawed at its roots, we should never be using it, period. Biden was right to promise to eliminate the federal death penalty, and Garland was right to call out the system as arbitrary, discriminatory, and far too prone to human error. If the president and attorney general believe what they have said, they must not authorize another death sentence – not even in this case.

For more than 20 years, medication abortion has been a safe, effective, FDA-approved method for people to end a pregnancy in the comfort of their own homes. In states where abortion remains legal, medication abortion is an essential and widely used option for care; and due to its accessibility via telehealth and mail delivery, it plays a critical role in ensuring safe and timely access to care for people who live far away from the nearest abortion provider or face long wait-times for an in-person appointment.

While the Biden administration has taken recent action to improve access to medication abortion, anti-abortion politicians and extremist groups are using every trick in the book to outlaw mifepristone — one of two drugs used in medication abortion — as part of their larger, concerted campaign to end abortion access entirely nationwide.

Here are some of the key facts you need to know about mifepristone and why it’s a critical part of our fight for abortion access going into the new year:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved mifepristone in 2000 as a safe and effective way to end a pregnancy. Today, based on high-quality evidence, mifepristone is also endorsed by leading medical authorities like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists as part of the superior medication treatment regimen for miscarriage care.

Study after study has shown the exceeding safety and efficacy of mifepristone for use in abortion and miscarriage care. In fact, mifepristone is safer than Tylenol and Viagra when it comes to serious medical complications.

Since being approved, mifepristone has increasingly become an essential part of abortion access across the country. Even before Roe was overturned, medication abortion accounted for more than half of abortions across the country.

“It’s just so much easier to feel safe and supported and loved when you’re having a medication abortion, because there’s more of a level of control that you have over the process than if you’re using another method.”

— Maleeha Aziz, abortion storyteller and activist

Despite its approval and long safety track-record, the FDA has continued to impose a set of medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone, known as a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS), which has made it needlessly difficult for women and other people who need abortion care to access the medication. Medication abortion has also faced targeted attacks by state politicians in their effort to push abortion out of reach bit by bit; and since Roe was overturned, abortion bans in several states have outlawed medication abortion entirely, along with procedural abortion care.

Credit: Allison Shelley

Following the science, the FDA has repealed several medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone in recent years. Most significantly, ACLU lawsuits prompted the agency to eliminate its illogical in-person pill pick-up requirement and finally permit people to get the medication by mail or from a pharmacy by prescription, rather than having to travel to an abortion provider which could be hours away. Though this is meaningful progress, the FDA still imposes needless restrictions on mifepristone that are not applied to similarly safe medications. Notably, mifepristone’s safety record remains just as strong in countries that have eliminated medically unnecessary restrictions like those that the FDA continues to impose.

Mifepristone is one of two drugs used in abortion and miscarriage care, which is different from medications used to prevent pregnancy in the first place — like birth control or emergency contraceptives, also known as the morning-after pill. According to leading medical organizations, these medications prevent pregnancy by impeding ovulation and preventing fertilization, and remain legal in every state. Despite this clear distinction, which the FDA further endorsed recently, misinformation conflating contraceptives and abortion have continued to spread.

As we navigate the first year without the protections of Roe v. Wade, attacks by anti-abortion extremists and politicians on medication abortion care will only increase. Already, state politicians have introduced bills to curtail the use of medication abortion care and dark-money groups are devising ways to push care out of reach entirely. That means it’s all the more important to understand this vital medication and spread the word.

“The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American, be he/she legally or actually Black or White. It is a fearful inheritance, for which untold multitudes, long ago, sold their birthright…

It is not pleasant to be forced to recognize, more than thirty years later, that neither this dynamic nor this necessity have changed. There have been superficial changes, with results at best ambiguous and, at worst, disastrous. Morally, there has been no change at all and a moral change is the only real one…

The only real change vividly discernible in this present, unspeakably dangerous chaos is a panic-stricken apprehension on the part of those who have maligned and subjugated others for so long that the tables have been turned.”
–James Baldwin, Preface to the 1984 edition of “Notes of a Native Son”

Thirty years after publishing his “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin revisited his influential essays. It is interesting to see the 60 year old reflect on the words of a younger version of himself entering the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

Growing up in Broward County schools, we learned about the Civil Rights Movement like we do American Revolution: Years of mistreatment create a conflict. The freedom fighters are heroes, the oppressors, villains. Bloody battles are fought, the war is eventually won, and a new, fairer system overhauls the old.

That was a lie.

Baldwin observed near the end of his life that the conclusion of the Civil Rights Movement and the important victories its heroes secured did not mark the end of racism in America. Americans were subject and doomed to repeat a vicious cycle of racial subjugation for generations thereafter. White supremacy continued to rear its ugly head in new forms in American life.

Around the time of Baldwin’s secondary observation, just thirty years after the brutal fight for civil rights, policymakers in Washington used aggressive city planning to decimate Black communities and destroy generations of wealth in the process. And while communities were still reeling from this devastation, Congressional power brokers gave the criminal justice system and police more power to disproportionately incarcerate Black and Hispanic Americans compared to white Americans for drug crimes, even with similar drug use rates. Families and loved ones to this day live with the repercussions of our country's failed drug war.  

A predecessor of Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, also challenged white supremacy for most of his life. And while many white Americans claim to hold him in high regard today, he too documented the shameful unwillingness of America's political establishment to pursue meaningful reconciliation with Black Americans, even after the Civil War ended and the 13th Amendment was ratified. Racism also did not end with Reconstruction, as Douglass woefully witnessed.  He challenged America’s commitment to equality in one of his most famous speeches, delivered in 1890:

“The United States Government made the negro a citizen, will it protect him as a citizen? This is the problem. It made him a soldier, will it honor him as a patriot? This is the problem. It made him a voter, will it defend his right to vote? This is the problem. This, I say, is more a problem for the nation than for the negro, and this is the side of the question far more than the other which should be kept in view by the American people.”

Douglass’ questions are ones many of us are still asking, more than a century after they were spoken.

It is difficult to use the word “unprecedented” as 2023 begins replete with the hyper-focused scrubbing of Black history in Florida schools. Gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics in Florida, stalled debates about police accountability, the continued call to protect and honor Black lives, and, now, callbacks to Jim Crow-era sentencing guides add to these harmful tactics to silence Black Americans and obstruct the pursuit of true equity.

Black history is American history.

Black history is American history. Black Americans helped engineer the Space Race, earned gold medals in our country’s name at the Olympics for generations, birthed rock and roll music (Robert Johnson and Chuck Berry), and were present at the very moment that begat the country’s founding. The Black experience is uniquely American. Still, the history and contributions of the Black people who helped build this country is devalued in American history. 

This Black History Month, we encourage all Floridians to learn of the foundational contributions Black Americans have made to our state and country.

All Floridians must challenge attempts to cull Black history to marginal interpretations, and efforts to chill our voices, and our freedom. We cannot be silent observers of the vicious cycles of subjugation that are as old as this country. Instead, we must remind each other that mere scraps of progress do not equate to the necessary moral shift needed to achieve true equality. We must challenge each other to reevaluate our own values and commitments to democracy, not just for ourselves, but for everyone.