Tommaso Tozzi and Giacomo Verde, with the co-operation of many groups and national and international associations, organize a VIRTUAL RALLY AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY to protest against the sites of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and of the State of Texas, which will be held within an art event on November 30th 2000, from 18:00 to 19:00 hrs. The virtual rally will happen on occasion of a real one sponsored by the Tuscany Region (Florence, Fortezza da Basso) to celebrate the anniversary of the renunciation to the death penalty by the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1786 (the first country in the world).
The artists also suggest repeating the netstrike against the sites of all those countries where the death penalty is still provided for by the law (see the enclosed LIST OF COUNTRIES WHERE THE DEATH PENALTY IS STILL PROVIDED FOR BY THE LAW).
"It seems to me absurd that the law, which is the expression of public will, and despises and punishes homicide, commit one themselves, and, to discourage citizens from committing assassinations, order public assassination". Cesare Beccaria used these words in 1764 to denounce the barbaric and useless character of the death penalty: a few years later, in 1786, the Grand Duke of Tuscany abolished the death penalty in his state.
More than two hundred years later, 11,000 men and women are awaiting execution in one of the 118 Countries which still have the death penalty.
Only in 1998 at least 1625 State homicides were committed and nearly 4000 people were condemned to death.
It is time to say stop to an ineffective punishment which transforms society and the State into assassins, putting them on the same plane as he criminal.
It is time for the world's civil society to make its voice heard.
The purpose of the rally is to pressurise the Public bodies of those countries which still provide for the death penalty, so they immediately put off pending executions and adopt provisions to definitively abolish the death penalty from their legal systems.
The netstrike and its motivations have been communicated both to the representatives of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the State of Texas sites and the main international media and organisations able of spreading the news both pre-emptively and successively.
