Demonstrators gather at CCP for exhibit's last day

Matt Heistand Arizona Daily Wildcat Tusconans protest capital punishment yesterday in front of The Center for Creative Photography which is featuring photographs of the Cambodian Killing Fields. None of the protesters attend the UA.

"I think for Christian reasons and humanitarian reasons, there is no reason to have it (the death penalty)," said Anne Stoutimore, a member of the Coalition of Arizonans to Abolish the Death Penalty.

The protesters carried signs and a large banner outside the center from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. as people attended the final showing of "Facing Death: Portraits from Cambodia's Killing Fields."

The exhibition featured 100 black-and-white photographs from the 1970s of political prisoners arriving to S-21, the secret prison in Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh, where 14,200 executions took place. Only seven people are known to have survived.

"When a government starts killing people, they can justify it no matter what," said protester Katie Bolger, representing the Green Party. "The Chinese government executing pro-democracy protesters is an example."

Bolger said the exhibit illustrates that the government cannot be trusted to decide who will die.

"I am here protesting because the death penalty is always used arbitrarily," said Claudia Ellquist, a member of Church Women United, a group active in the coalition.

Ellquist, a University of Arizona law school graduate, said rich or intelligent people seldom receive the death penalty.

Out of the 20,000 Americans convicted of homicide each year, only a handful of the 200 sentenced to death row are ever executed, she said.

Maike Stam, a scholar visiting from the Netherlands, stopped to pick up information the protesters were handing out.

"It is better to put someone in prison than to kill people," Stam said, adding that the Netherlands has not imposed the death penalty since World War II.

"It is not the way to solve the problem."

Don Norgard, founder of the coalition and of Sanctity of Life: People Against Executions and the Coalition, said he was protesting because the death penalty is something that is racist and economically biased.

"African Americans' chances of being executed are 10 times greater if the victim is white," Norgard said. "It is a roulette."

Norgard founded the organizations while his stepson, John Eastlack, was being convicted of murder and sentenced to death for the 1991 killing of two elderly Tucson residents.

Eastlack's sentence was reduced from death to life imprisonment in 1997 after the State Supreme Court overturned the sentence based on mental disorders and fetal alcohol syndrome.

Kathy Norgard, chairman of the coalition and one of the founding members, said the goal of the protest is ultimately to affect legislation.

Arizona has executed four death-row inmates since 1992. The recent execution of Karla Faye Tucker in Texas has reopened the death penalty debate. Debra Milke, convicted of conspiring to kill her 4-year-old son for an insurance policy, is Arizona's only woman on death row.