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?
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Troy Davis
(left) & Lawrence Brewer (right)
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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.
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