Community | September 22, 2011 | 4 comments

Two men were executed in America yesterday – but only one of them won the pity of the human-rights brigade

Image
crabbyoldguy
Yesterday in America, two men were executed, but you will probably only have heard of one of them: Troy Davis, who was killed in the state of Georgia for the murder of a police officer. The other executed man, Lawrence Brewer, put to death in the state of Texas for murdering a black man in 1998, has barely featured in the news at all. Unlike Davis, he did not win the backing of Amnesty International and its trendy supporters. No one tweeted and retweeted their sorrow over Brewer or made a public spectacle of how heavy his execution weighed upon their hearts, as many did with Davis. No one lit candles outside the American Embassy for Brewer in full glare of photojournalists’ clicking cameras. No one wore t-shirts saying “I AM LAWRENCE BREWER”.

It might seem obvious as to why Davis was championed while Brewer was ignored: there were many doubts about Davis’s conviction, whereas Brewer was undoubtedly guilty. Furthermore, he was a racist toerag, a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, whose murder of James Byrd Jr was racially motivated and horrifically executed. But if you are opposed to the death penalty on principle, as many of the Troy Davis campaigners claimed to be, then you should be just as outraged by the execution of Brewer as you were by the execution of Davis. You should be as opposed to the state killing of a guilty racist as you are to the state killing of a possibly guilty black man. Even James Byrd Jr’s son asked for the state of Texas to show mercy to his father’s killer, but no army of bleeding-heart Twitterers backed him up.

The airbrushing of Brewer from yesterday’s heated discussions on the death penalty speaks volumes about the Troy Davis campaign. It seems pretty clear that it was motivated, not by a principled, across-the-board opposition to the state killing of citizens, but rather by campaigners’ desire to indulge in some very public moral preening. Unlike the Brewer execution, which was ugly and complicated, the Davis execution could be squeezed into a cosy moral narrative in which the state of Georgia was depicted as backward and racist and those who opposed the execution of Davis presented themselves as purer than pure, good and decent, and more than willing to prove it by writing tweets of concern every four or five minutes. What message should we take from this disparity in campaigning? That Troy Davis did not deserve to die but Lawrence Brewer did? Such moral flightiness, such brutal arbitrariness, reveals much about today’s very changeable campaigners against the death penalty.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100106437/two-men-were-executed...
  1. groups:
    Community
  2. tags:
    Human Rights,  Death Penalty,  Amnesty International
  3.     
    |

4 comments // Two men were executed in America yesterday – but only one of them won the pity of the human-rights brigade

  • Varex_Sythe
    • 0
      Varex_Sythe  

    • It makes sense though, if you want to get rid of the death penalty, you should not focus on recipients of the death penalty who were so obviously guilty for committing so horrid a murder and/or other crime that would demand the death penalty.

      If you bring focus to those people then the obvious rebuttal is that the only other option was for the criminal to spend the rest of their lives in prison, something which can cost more money, resources and man hours to carry out. You, in theory, save money, time, and carry out the closest thing to justice that a lot of people can imagine when a crime of that nature has been committed, an eye for an eye.

      However, if you focus on people who receive the death penalty when there was reasonable doubt in their case, then you can throw a big wrench in the ideology of those who are for the death penalty. Suddenly, if someone can be at the wrong place at the wrong time and have a bunch of circumstantial evidence against them, then that someone could be anyone and not just some evil murdering psycho. And that someone could even be those who support the death penalty.

      Basically, it is a tactic to make the general public not only feel sympathy for the cause, but also to make them feel as though they could become victims of such horrid circumstances as well. If it can happen to one innocent person (and it has happened to many more than just one) then it can happen to anyone, including me, you, or one of them.

      There are potentially some other reasons why you're not seeing so much of the death penalty that was carried out in Texas.

      1) It is Texas, they kind of set the national standard for the death penalty and someone being put to death in that state is more akin to business as usual than it is in most others.

      2) Unless I am mistaken, there is not really any reasonable doubt that the guy in Texas did not commit the horrible act that he was accused of. So even though the death penalty is abhorrent, it worked as it was intended.

      3) Consequently, the execution in Georgia ended up putting a man to death who very well might not have been guilty. That is a very large fuckup from which there is no means of compensation. What is the state of Georgia going to do if it is later proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Troy Davis was in fact innocent? His family will never see him again in this world and it is unlikely that any amount of money that might be awarded to his family from the state would ever take his place or make things "right."

      4) There have been a lot of videos online of either police (almost entirely European American police) either harassing, assaulting, and in some cases needlessly murdering African Americans. This is either a potential media shit storm brewing, or it is just another step until we get there.

    • 8 months ago
  • crabbyoldguy
    • 0
      crabbyoldguy  
    • Varex_Sythe:

      I look at the death penalty as sort of a "social contract" matter. If the death penalty is on the state's books and you commit an eligible offense you then entered into a contract with the state.

      As far as the optics go it is a great case for the cause to use to win the hearts of those on the fence. But with any fence there are two sides and if ones argument is valid they can present the pro/con and feel confident in the out come.

      In Davis's statement 'I'd like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I'm not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother. I am innocent.' the word "personally" throws a lot of suspicion on his innocence, something that the word parsers here should have been all over but shied away from due to the cause. Some articles on the web left it out completely.

      In the Tookie Williams case, in California, there was a great push by Amnesty International to hold him up as a Noble Prize nominee, over looking the fact that he admitted that he wanted to kill white people, truly a WTF moment. The web is still full of Tookie supporters and he's been dead for six years.

      Now if we could change what "Life Without Parole" means maybe it would be easier to abolish the death penalty. For instance solitary confinement from day one, no books, no visitors, no nothing but health care, food, and a bath. But that would violate their constitutional rights, while we forget about the constitutional rights of the person that they killed.

      Out of control police are being held responsible due to video and I hope that high stress communities will one day have greater trust in the police than they have fear of the criminals living in their communities.

    • 8 months ago
  • crabbyoldguy
    • 0
      crabbyoldguy  

    • "
      But if you are opposed to the death penalty on principle, as many of the Troy Davis campaigners claimed to be, then you should be just as outraged by the execution of Brewer as you were by the execution of Davis. You should be as opposed to the state killing of a guilty racist as you are to the state killing of a possibly guilty black man.
      "

    • 8 months ago
  • jim_b
more from Community:
from the community

top videos