No cause for the death penalty

Georgina Guedes

A man was executed by lethal injection in the United States last night. Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist, was sentenced to death in 1998 for his part in the murder of a black man by dragging him behind a truck - for no reason other than the colour of his skin.

The news of Brewer’s execution generally only forms a footnote to another story - that of the execution of Troy Davis, a man whose execution for murder also went ahead yesterday despite the recantation of the evidence given by seven of the nine eyewitnesses who testified against him. Of the remaining two, one refuses to speak, and the other is Sylvester Coles, who may himself be the murderer and was heard confessing to the crime when drunk.

Despite all this, which may not be evidence of Davis’s innocence, but is certainly sufficient information to cast doubt on the verdict, the execution took place. Outside the prison, family members and human rights groups protested the killing of a man by the state.

There are two parts to the protest. The one is that if any doubt exists as to someone’s guilt, that person should not be executed. The other is that the death penalty is a human rights violation, no matter who it is carried out on – even the Brewers of this world, no matter how certain the conviction or unpalatable the crime.

Anyone who has been the victim of any kind of crime knows the feelings of impotent rage and the violent fantasies that can follow such an incident. If, in the blink of an eye, I could vanish all the truly abhorrent criminals on Earth, I would probably have done so – especially in the wake of a crime committed against me. But this is merely a fantasy, fuelled by anger.

Countries that continue to implement death sentences are fulfilling the fantasies of those driven by a childish need for retribution. That a government can kill a citizen to show the rest of its people that killing is bad has always been seriously flawed thinking. It smacks of Nixon’s inane bluster, “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal!”

While the president was in no way involved in yesterday’s executions, state-sanctioned murder is somehow viewed as acceptable by some groups following similar, vague reasoning. But murder never brings back the lives of the lost, and adding more death to an already violent situation only exacerbates the senselessness of all the killings.

My infant son, with a subconscious sense of the peaks and troughs of a news cycle, woke me at every twist in the Troy Davis story last night. I checked in on Twitter as it unfolded, and was elated as the execution was delayed so that a final appeal could be heard and then devastated as it went ahead. My own feelings can have only been a drop in the ocean compared to those of Davis and his family in a process that can be described as torture or a human rights abuse.

Last night, America and humanity failed Troy Davis. May he rest in peace, and may his death act as another nail in the coffin for the death penalty.

“This is bigger than me. The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me.”  - Troy Davis

- Georgina Guedes is a freelance writer. You can follow @georginaguedes on Twitter.

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