The road to abolition

This past Wednesday night, the evening of Sept. 21, 2011, I was doing what many others across the country were doing. Yes, there was work I should have been doing. Political obligations I should have been following through on. But instead, I was glued to the television while constantly refreshing my Twitter stream for what seemed like an eternity as I awaited news about the status of Troy Davis' last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. All we will ever know is that four hours after it was submitted, the petition was denied and Troy Davis was executed by the State of Georgia. Troy Davis may well have been guilty of the crime of which he was convicted; but at 11:08 PM ET, a man was killed, despite there being no physical evidence of his crime, and despite the fact that a substantial majority of the eyewitnesses who implicated him recanted while claiming undue pressure from investigators to finger the man they had apparently decided was responsible. And he was killed in name of the people of Georgia.

That same evening in Texas, another man was killed, though far fewer people will lose any sleep over him. Lawrence Russell Brewer, a member of a white supremacist gang who without a doubt partook in the racially motivated and grisly murder of James Byrd Jr., was put to death for his savage crime. And for the sake of justice, both men should be alive today.

I wasn't always an abolitionist. When I was younger, I firmly believed that the sentence of death was an appropriate one for the egregious crimes for which it was usually dispensed; after all, society should harbor no tolerance for those who commit the acts of treason or the particularly heinous murders that warranted the sentence, and I even advocated for that belief as an activist. In 2007, I was appointed to serve on the committee of the California Democratic Party that was tasked with writing the party's platform. In one respect, the platform that emerged from our committee was groundbreaking; to our knowledge, it was the first time any Democratic Party in any state had advocated for full marriage equality in its platform. But other activists in the party were pushing for the committee to take an even more radical position: call for the abolition of capital punishment in California.

While we appreciated the passion of the abolitionists, even those on the committee who agreed with them found the thought of taking such a position troubling; the death penalty, after all, has consistently had strong majority support, and even a supposed liberal bastion like California has consistently supported "tough-on-crime" laws and initiatives, such as our draconian three strikes legislation. It would be an obvious risk, politically speaking, to put ourselves as a party on record as being supposedly softer on crime, as well as in opposition to the will of the people on this issue. What we decided to do instead was take a poll of all 3000 or so of the party's delegates to see where they stood on the issue, and factor that vote into the platform for the next cycle. I voted with my conscience at the time: that the death penalty should rightfully be imposed on the most severe of crimes.

The results of the survey, however, were overwhelming. A massive majority of Democratic activists throughout the state were against the death penalty. At that moment, I decided that I needed to find out why I was so out of touch with the people with whom I shared so many passions in common. It didn't take long to find out that my support for the death penalty was based on a set of assumptions that turned out not to be true. I had simply assumed that the modern justice system had overcome its well-known prejudices of the past. It hasn't. I had assumed that the judicial and political machinery that applied capital punishment was so cautious that it would take every care to make sure that every person executed was guilty beyond any hint of a reasonable doubt. This wasn't true either. And lastly, I hadn't even realized that the death penalty came with a massive financial cost to the public, not just a moral one. While I regrettably did not get to be part of the team that drafted it, the next iteration of the California Democratic Party did indeed acknowledge the stated preference of its activist base by calling for the replacement of all death sentences with permanent incarceration?a platform I can now claim wholehearted agreement with.

If there were any lingering doubts about this newfound conversion, they died at 11:08 ET this past Wednesday, and not just because of Troy Davis. While most people across this country may feel that Laurence Brewer deserved to die for his crime, the system that allowed him to suffer the ultimate punishment he may arguably have deserved is the same system that allowed Troy Davis to be put to death on such flimsy evidence. The families of both James Byrd, Jr. and Mark MacPhail may in fact feel more peace. It is my sincerest of hopes that I never end up in that position, but if I ever did, I can easily imagine feeling a strong desire to see someone who had victimized my family suffer that punishment. In fact, I can easily imagine having those feelings for lesser offenses. And it is precisely for that reason that we do not have a system of vigilante justice. It is exactly to avoid such rationales and desires for vengeance that such decisions are taken out of our hands and put in the hands of a system that is expressly designed to be impartial and dispassionate.

In the end, we are left with one incontrovertible fact: Troy Davis may well have been wrongly executed. And there is only one way to ensure that nobody else is ever wrongly put to death: to make sure that nobody is put to death ever again in this country. Those who seek justice, equality, compassion and even fiscal responsibility in our government must honor Troy Davis by using his death to educate a public that may well have been awoken from its self-imposed national slumber on an issue that quite literally is a choice between life and death.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/Binluw_Ts5k/-The-road-to-abolition

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