In an opinion piece featured on the Capitol Weekly website, Carrie Harambasic, Head of Business Development with Lush Cosmetics, writes “Lush Cosmetics urges Governor Newsom to Clear California’s Death Row.”
Lush Cosmetics recently ran an in-store action calling on Governor Newsom to commute all death row sentences, where staff spoke with customers about the failure of the death penalty and provided customers a chance to send a message to Governor Newsom.
Excerpts from the opinion piece are featured below.
Some may wonder why a beauty company would take on an issue such as the death penalty. Those people don’t know Lush.
Since 2006, we have been campaigning online and in our shop windows, tackling human rights, environmental justice, and animal protection issues that most brands would find too controversial to take on. Campaigning is a core value of our business, and an integral part of the ethics that make Lush, Lush.
Our advocacy against capital punishment goes back almost a decade. In 2017, our Death ≠ Justice campaign raised awareness about the failures of the death penalty, especially the risk of executing innocent people. Through the sales of the limited edition 31 States Bath Bomb, named for the number of states which had the death penalty in place at the time, we raised $132,000 for national abolition efforts. We also released a documentary, Exonerated, about Kwame Ajamu, an innocent man who spent 28 years on Ohio’s death row for a crime he didn’t commit.
It’s clear to us that the death penalty doesn’t address the root causes of crime and that we need systemic solutions across the justice system in order to create safer communities. Nationwide, the death penalty is deeply flawed. Evidence shows that executions frequently go wrong, causing immense and prolonged suffering, with Black people 220% more likely to suffer botched executions than white people. It is applied unfairly and in a racially biased manner, harmful to nearly everyone who is touched by it — including many victims’ families — rampant with wrongful convictions, and wasteful of precious taxpayer resources.
Now, by commuting every death sentence to life without the possibility of parole, Governor Newsom can ensure that no future administration can undo the progress already made, all while demonstrating the moral courage and political leadership needed to reinvigorate momentum towards ending the death penalty nationwide.
Read the full opinion piece, “Lush Cosmetics urges Governor Newsom to Clear California’s Death Row” at the Capitol Weekly website. Capitol Weekly is a publication of Open California, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 2012 to inform, enlighten and educate Californians about public policy and state governance, and to provide a platform for engagement with public officials, advocates and political interests.
