The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA), a coalition of 40 prominent Latino organizations, this week joined the growing, bipartisan list of groups calling for the end of the death penalty, noting that Latinos are “directly affected by its injustices.”
For the first time ever, the NHLA Public Policy Agenda includes positions on drug policy and criminal justice and policing reforms. Perhaps most notably, the groups unanimously agreed to support abolition of capital punishment, a practice they say “disproportionately impacts
people of color.”
“The criminal justice system is so broken, there will never be an impartial way to apply capital punishment to avoid the fact that the most determinant factor in whether or not someone is put to death is the race of the victim,” said Juan Cartagena, co-chair of the NHLA Civil Rights committee and president of LatinoJustice.
“We never had to dig any deeper into morality or issues about death in general,” he added. “The racialized aspects of the imposition of the death penalty in the United States could not just be overlooked, and that became the unifying piece.”
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