Georgia On My Mind

I wrote a letter. I signed petitions. I voiced my opinion wherever I could. I prayed. And I was not alone.

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles did not hear. Did not listen. Did not want to listen. Could not accept even the simplest argument against putting Troy Davis to death: it is hypocritical. Hypocritical for a "Christian" nation to stand by the Biblical and moral admonition against the taking of another person's life, and yet have no trouble with allowing the State the power to do what we ourselves have stated we will not, as if the creation of the State imbues it with some form of shield against moral ambiguity, or worse, proclaims it to have some authority capable of overriding even the highest admonition in human society. Apparently, when handed to the State, a soul no longer has any meaning to anyone.

There is nothing of justice in this decision, only the need to quench a thirst for vengeance. One hesitates to pin ulterior motives on those who are left with the weighty responsibility of determining who shall live and who shall die, but even an iota of doubt should be sufficient for anyone to see it reasonable to choose life over death, for the system must always err to the side of conservation and justice. To beat a hasty path to the executioner's chamber in the face of reasonable doubts is the mark of those who would see their power unchallenged and their prejudices confirmed.

One would hope the merest hint of this execution would stick in the craw of a decent person, but if it were to do so only after the fact of a man's death, this would not say much for those who claim aegis over clemency or those who claim to revere life. Execution is a tool of emotion, a hearkening back to the Middle Ages, to the triumph of fear and prejudice over reason and humanity. It is a tool that is best relegated to the shed, abandoned like so many other ancestral barbarisms: stoning, crucifixion, inquisition, etc. A modern society such as ours should not hold on to the egregious behaviors of our past.

One can only hope that there is yet a bolt from the blue, that some reasonable, sensible member of the State moves to terminate this reprehensible act before its culmination. If not, the death of Troy Davis will be another stain upon our American society, heaped upon the many others we have yet to fully wipe away.

A Plea For Clemency For The Wrongly Accused Troy Davis

There is a man named Troy Davis, who is in prison in Georgia, and is facing execution on September 21st, unless there is a stay. The simple story is: 20 years ago, Mr. Davis was convicted of killing a police officer, with no physical evidence, and the testimony of several witnesses. Several of those witnesses have come forward to say that their testimony was coerced by the presence of law enforcement officials, and they have recanted their stories. There is a tremendous amount of doubt now, and it behooves the State of Georgia to re-open the case and award Mr. Davis a new and hopefully fairer trial. So far, the government of Georgia has shown no inclination to do so, and so, many individuals such as myself, through the auspices of the Internet, have been involved in a concerted campaign to convince the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant a stay and allow there to be a new trial. As such, after the break, is a copy of the letter I am sending to the board.

Take Not A Life Lightly

By now, the tumult has swept over the nation from corner to corner: a Republican Presidential candidate stands before a room as states he has had no trouble exercising the death penalty, and is lauded by the crowd with applause. For a moment, one might have noted the exuberant and keening voices of the Colosseum amid the clapping, for it was a spectacle best suited to that forgotten time when fighting men and condemned souls were made to dance in death for the approval of the crowd, and their Emperor dispensed his own brand of "justice," by making it a sport of blood.

You might think your author hyperbolic, but I report only what sensation comes to me when events transpire before my eyes and ears. It was a singular moment, like so few I have witnessed, that horrified and enraged me. Were I not better prepared for it from the commentary I read prior to watching it, apoplexy might have welled up from within me. For this moment, unlike many of late, sets the tale of this country in the starkest relief, casting a shadow across a nation that prides itself on equality, integrity, faith, and justice.

Inhumanity

A woman was killed last night in Virginia, killed by the State, killed for planning and perpetrating a heinous crime, the murder of her husband and stepson by killers she hired and apparently, had sexual relations with. She was apparently of a lower IQ, and her lawyers made the case that given her more limited mental capacity, her punishment was far too harsh. No one agreed with them; even the Supreme Court of the United States refused to stay the execution. It is interesting to note that she did not commit the murders herself, but the men she hired have received life sentences, and not the death penalty.

There is no reason to argue the merits of the case here. Justice in America is an imperfect system sometimes, and no matter what we may think of it, as long as the system operates as intended, we cannot argue with the result, having given our tacit approval to it by electing our representatives, who are responsible for the statutes enforced. The simplest way to change how justice works is to change the laws, and to do that, we must vote for the right representatives to do it.

What we must discuss, once and for all, is the need for retribution and vengeance in the name of the State. The idea is as old as humanity: an eye for an eye. You kill one of ours, we kill one of yours. You attack our tribe, we attack yours. Death is still, sadly, the ultimate currency of justice, and the belief has survived the millennia, that the murderer must die to make up for the life or lives they have taken, as some kind of appeasement of God or the universe.

Murder is the most heinous of crimes. To take a life, with malice and in violence, is to stain the soul, because once taken, it cannot be restored. Death is the ultimate doorway to whatever lies beyond, a door that only admits, never releases. Once the murderer commits the act, they are persona non grata in human society.

Then comes the hammer of justice, to strike them down. The murderer can expect little sympathy and faint mercy at the hands of a justice system that marks them as the worst of the worst. Even where there are mitigating circumstances, the fact of relieving another human being of life leads others to look down on the person whose hands are covered in innocent blood.

Herein lies the issue that vexes us even now: do we take from the murderer, the life that they so easily took from someone else? Does a murderer, by committing the act, forfeit their own life by fiat? Is there true justice in killing the killer? My mind always told me that those who found it so easy to take life, should realize that to do so, meant the forfeiture of their own. In this way, the idea would prove a natural deterrent to murder. Now, I am not so sure.

When you watch shows on television about cases of murder, what invariably strikes you is that, even in states where the death penalty is prevalent, murder still goes on, and goes on in a profusion of ways, from the simple murder by a robber surprised by a store clerk, to the cold, calculated murder of the serial killer, reeling off victims one-by-one or in droves, to the person who has become unhinged by circumstances, and seeks revenge for perceived injustices in their life by taking the lives of others, often in armed and brutal slaughter.

Murder is not the result of the higher, thinking brain; it is a relic of the primitive animal brain. Deep down, instincts from millions of years ago, the kill-or-be-killed, fight-or-flee kind, still lurk in the dark recesses of human consciousness. Triggered by childhood abuse, chemical imbalance, brain injury, drug abuse, psychological torture, or even conditioning, the murder of another is the ceding of control of the cerebral cortex to the primitive medullar regions. The instinct, the need for self-preservation, bubbles up from its hiding place, overwhelms reason and logic, and takes even the most decent of people to a place where taking the life of another is almost a requirement. In essence, the idea, the instinct, the drive to kill another being is a part of everyone of us, and only those of us with the strongest wills can overcome whatever urges it may flood our higher logic centers with.

Given that it is a hard-coded piece of our primitive past, and that the act can be triggered in so many fashions, is it any wonder we are still plagued by it, even in the calmest and quietest of communities? Some of the most peaceful nations on Earth still have murder, though perhaps not at the rate found in the United States. It is there, hiding in the bushes, waiting for its moment. For many of us, that moment never comes, and the instinct slowly dies, fading and wasting away to nothing, smothered by more reasoned and logical impulses.

So, from a rational standpoint, the idea that proclaiming that a murderer will be hoist upon their own petard, subject to the most singular and permanent punishment known, in order to deter further murders, is folly. The instinct to murder is welded too closely to us still, to be so easily stamped out by our commandments or laws. While our rational selves know inherently that taking another life is wrong and amoral, even that knowledge is sometimes not enough to overcome a deep-seated desire, biding its time in the darker parts of our primitive brains. To kill the killer is to place no greater stricture on murder than can be reasonably taught to any human being through parents, teachers, and clergy. For some, no matter the environment they are immersed in, the urge to kill will not be sated or starved. If we are to consider ourselves a civilized race of beings, then we must also live by the stricture we would have others live by. For the State, or even a citizen or citizens, to decide that murder is a justifiable punishment for murder, is to violate that tenet we hold so dear in our hearts: thou shall not kill.

Death Does Not Become Us

It is, perhaps, only instinctual that when we learn of a murder or murders most heinous and atrocious, that our guts roil, our blood boils, and even the most peaceful and loving amongst us feels blood-lust well up from the deep recesses of our primitive brain. The Biblical injunction of an "eye for an eye" overwhelms its pacifistic cousin, "turn the other cheek." Somewhere, in the dark corners of our hearts, we feel that to put the murderer to death is only just and fitting.

This feeling inevitably provokes some to remind us that the death of the murderer in no way changes the outcome of their actions -- their victims are still dead. To put a murderer to death is an abuse of the power of the State, it serves no useful purpose, and the murderer can easily be condemned to a life incarcerated, with no hope of parole. Invariably, this leads to a brouhaha over the cost of incarceration, law, justice, morality, and government that leads to no clear winner or loser of the argument, and the same problem as before -- what to do?

We must ask ourselves, as humanity, what is in the best interests of us all? Is the desire for vengeance greater than the desire for justice? Are we to be ruled by the laws of rational humanity, or the laws of our still extant animal passions? What price do we pay, as individual people, as a society, as humanity, for putting a person to death, even if that person has committed the most flagrant and destructive acts?

Clearly, to kill a murderer is to eliminate a problem. It removes the potential for escape, for recidivism, and for perpetuation of the aura surrounding such a person (the potential for that person to become a perverted icon for "worship"). It is, literally, a dead end, and we can awake the next day knowing they will plague us no longer. And yet... at what point is their death really justified? Do we judge the severity by body count, or who was murdered, or the means of the murder, or the defendants justifications? What criteria do we define for execution, so as to be fair and just? The States have struggled with these questions for as long as there has been a United States, and in over two hundred years, there has been no good resolution. As noted above, Biblical times were also fraught with a conflict between "Thou shall not kill" and "eye for an eye." And we have not even broached the idea of the death of an innocent person, convicted of a murder they did not commit.

Depending on your predilections, you will lean one way or the other, and consensus is but a fleeting hope. Perhaps, though, we should look at the problem not as the specific instance of the crime, but as an adjunct to human society. Instead of making the focus so narrow, we should, instead, broaden the scope.

It comes down to the principles we wish to base our human society on. Law, and justice, are but a small part of the human experience, and while our society is constructed around the idea that law exists to protect us and allow us the freedom to be who we are, free of the interference of others, we know we give up some of that freedom in order to follow the law. Moral conundrums are aplenty, as it is possible to argue that in certain instances, perhaps the ends justify the means, and the man who steals medicine for his sick wife, or the wife who kills her abusive husband, are obeying some "higher order" of morality that supersedes ideas human law and justice. The case can be made that society is stable, only where law cannot be absolute, and where the letter of the law may be bent to fit the circumstance.

When humanity began to assemble more and more complicated arrangements, from tribes, to settlements, to towns and cities, up to nation states, law had to adapt to the plethora of instances and circumstances that were spawned by these increasingly larger groups. Law moved from the simple level of commandments, to pervasive codes that were important to standardize personal freedom and responsibility, commerce, trade, and relations between these entities. The complexity of law in modern times, makes the case for what constitutes justice that much more difficult to parse. A legal process that is fraught with technicality and is inured with outmoded social mores, combined with rapid changes in society and technology, leads to a no-man's land of loopholes, test cases, and overwrought precedent.

It is in this cloud of uncertainty, that we are asked to render judgment. We must, somehow, take all these things into consideration, and determine what course is best. In courtrooms every day, law and justice are thrashed about, burned in the crucible of human emotion, and recast and retooled. The product is not always pure, nor is it always empathetic, nor even just; the best that can be said, is that the attempt has been made and that is the best we can do today.

Where human life is concerned, however, that may not be good enough. Holding the life of another in our hands, we only have our experiences and beliefs and codes of conduct to guide us. The determination of whether a convicted criminal deserves to die, is a mountain more daunting than even Mt. Everest in Winter.

Maybe, then, it is best to declare, once and for all, that killing someone is wrong, even if it is the State doing it. We do ourselves a disservice with moral equivocation; just as it is said that one cannot teach a child to forgo violence by using corporal punishment on him/her, perhaps the child that is current human society cannot progress until it is taught that violence as a form of resolution is unacceptable. Only when we put aside animal instinct for human reason and deduction, can we say we have left the infancy of our species behind.