Will a state supreme court challenge end California’s ‘racist’ record-setting death row for good?

When he was on death row for a murder he didn’t commit, a lot went through Shujaa Graham’s head.

Sometimes, he thought about ways to keep his mind and body sharp: push-ups, sit-ups, books from the prison library. Graham, who grew up in a family of share-croppers on a plantation in Louisiana, was first sent to prison at age 18 for a $35 robbery, for which he was sentenced to life.

He learned to read and write on the inside and became a dedicated activist, advocating for better conditions, protesting violence from prison staffers, and working with the Black Panthers. It was this activism, he believes, that led to him being wrongfully convicted for the 1973 murder of a prison guard and sentenced to death.

Sometimes during his six years on California’s death row, he drifted into despair. Not feeling suicidal exactly, but submerged in a pain so deep that he began to feel indifferent about the prospect of falling asleep and never waking up.

More than anything though, Graham, would dream about getting out and fighting the racism he saw in the prison system and capital punishment process.

“I dreamt that one day if I ever got out, I would do what I’m doing right now, and I would die doing it,” he said in an interview with The Independent from his home in Maryland.

Eventually, after the California Supreme Court found that prosecutors had systematically excluded African-American jurors over the course of Graham’s multiple trials, the activist was exonerated and released in 1981.

Now, as part of the exoneree organization Witness to Innocence, he has joined a group of civil rights organizations launching a campaign in the state that once prepared to execute him.

Earlier this month, the coalition filed an ambitious petition to the