AN AGNOSTIC ON THE DEATH PENALTY SPEAKS OF A TALE OF TWO EXECUTIONS

                On this date, September 21, 2011, an African American by the name of Troy Davis who murdered a White American Police Officer, Mark MacPhail and a White Supremacist named Lawrence Brewer who murdered an African American man, James Byrd Jr. were both executed by lethal injection in the U.S State of Georgia and Texas respectively. We are against any racism, so we supported both their executions. In our opinion, they both are ranked as the worst of the worst. We heard that there will be a vigil today to honor Troy Davis, we will not even waste my time on it. Why no vigil for Lawrence Brewer or any other killers?

 

Troy Davis (left) & Lawrence Brewer (right)

INTERNET SOURCE: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100106437/two-men-were-executed-in-america-yesterday-but-only-one-of-them-won-the-pity-of-the-human-rights-brigade/

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

By Brendan O'Neill Politics Last updated: September 22nd, 2011

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.

The only thing we did not agree with Brendan O’Neill is that there were doubts about Troy Davis’s conviction, no there were no doubts, he is as guilty as sin. However, most of what he wrote was actually true.