I said this over at Google Plus and realized I should bring it over here.
As those of you who remember reading my old post (linked here) will recall, the issue of Capital Punishment is less abstract for me than I wish it was.
I understand the emphases on Troy Davis’ innocence: they make the case all the more heinous. But execution of the guilty is just as barbaric. It is a conscious choice to say something about ourselves as a society — that we value blood retribution over public safety; that we value revenge over justice; that we value the fetishizing of our congealed hatred over the possibility, however remote, of reform and redemption.
Closure for the bereaved is an elusive thing. Some people never attain it. Some come to terms with their loss sooner than others. Revenge-killing doesn’t bring closure: it merely seals the deep hurt under a layer of assumed finality, so that that hurt can fester hidden away from public view. It makes the grieving worse. It cheapens the bereaved.
We are a lesser country tonight.
Agreed.
The difficulty is that I doubt that even a majority of the people lamenting in my feet give a rats ass for Troy Davis and his family or for Officer MacPhail and his family. It’s all about the death penalty. It’s an example, just as the execution is an example.
The real, messy, ambiguous lives of people will have to make an appearance, somewhere, or our society is doomed.
Thank you for saying this. I agree with every word. I generally try not to become too involved in death penalty cases because they just wreck me (ever since the first one in my lifetime back in the seventies—felt a visceral punch unlike with any issue I’ve felt strongly about). But this one crept up from the muck and sickened me.
Change.org reports that Davis’ sister says he was encouraged (comforted?) by all the people who signed the petition to save him. If he went to his death knowing that a lot of hearts were with him, well, we did something. Something small, but something.
Personally I don’t know if he was guilty or not; it doesn’t matter. As Chris says, it it barbaric for the state to take a life. Fundamentally barbaric. We are lessened as a people every time we do so.
Hi
I found this blog searching for nature photography, but I’d just like to say that there were quite a lot of people in Europe as well who signed petitions for Troy Davis. I was one of them. I think you sum it up nicely, it’s barbaric, regardless of if he was guilty.