On killing

[roadrunnertwice]

If you support or kinda-sorta-support the death penalty, can I please convince you to stop?

This has been on my mind since the Wednesday before last, when the state of Georgia murdered Troy Davis.* I've been against the death penalty for a long while now, but the -- I dunno, the sheer predictability of this incident, combined with some related reading that found me around the same time, has brought some shit into sharper focus for me.

I've stopped believing that the problem is a mainly institutional one, that executions might be justifiable if the judicial system were somehow infallible. I now think the desire to have the state kill a captive is fundamentally corrupt and corrupting.

Anyway, about that related reading. If it hasn't made the rounds to you already, you've really got to read this piece from back in August, about Dr. Martin Luther King and about terror and dread (via nkjemisin). It's very good and very clarifying, and connects some dots that I hadn't seen connected before. It doesn't have anything in particular to do with the penal system. Except then in late September, this research summary about the link between states that lynched and states that execute (via yeloson) started making the rounds again, and I went, "oh." And now I seem to have lost the ability to see wrongful executions as a malfunction of an imperfect system, as some non-racialized tragedy. Now they seem like an intended function of a partially-dismantled but still very active system, one designed to impart a "constant low level dread of atavistic violence."

They're not tragic, they're evil.

And that shift has gotten me even more sketched-out about executions in general, even when we're talking about a target who is verifiably, irredeemably vile. (Because sure: monsters are real, I'm not going to dispute that.) Watching in real time the way these men and women pushed and pushed and kept pushing to kill a man who may very well have been innocent -- who, let's be honest, almost certainly was innocent -- has taken away any remaining faith that that will to cut off a life, that death-lust, can be used for good. I think it's poisoned. I think maybe every time we let it out it corrodes our society, makes it worse.

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So, now what? I dunno. To start with, maybe I can get a few people to check out and send a form letter on this Reggie Clemons situation, which is maybe going to sound eerily familiar (via delux_vivens). There's also this list of things we can do in general about wrongful convictions (also via delux_vivens). (That's from the Innocence Project, who you might remember from that TAL episode about exonerations from a while back.) Not all of those suggestions are easy, but, well.

And if you're looking for more reading and maybe a small bit of hope, read this piece about Troy Davis's nephew and this article from Friday.

And as for me personally, since I'm kind of a dilettante with a full-time job and a time-consuming avocation to boot and I don't have high hopes about what I can personally do vis-a-vis activism, I reckon it's time I start paying the folk who do fight wickedness full-time, starting with Amnesty and the aforementioned Innocence Project. Maybe a few of you can, too.

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* You can probably already guess the rough outline of this one even if you weren't following it: black man accused of killing white cop, no physical evidence, seven of the nine witnesses have since recanted PLUS a different guy has confessed to the crime, very suspicious pattern of abuse and intimidation from cops, and they went and executed him anyway. God dammit.