Editor,
The execution of Troy Davis last Wednesday will haunt this nation into its distant future. It brings back to mind similar crimes this country has committed in the past, among them the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953, Shaka Sen Kofa in 2000, and Stanley Tookie Williams in 2005.
The fact that this country has chosen the death penalty as a means of justice is telling. It tells us hidden and unhidden secrets about the bloodthirsty longing that drives this nation in its desperate urge to find a national identity and coin a distinct image for itself. The results are ugly: the fascist beast has flexed its muscle.
Since its genocidal and racist foundation this country has suffered from a fatal inferiority complex. To cover it up, the country resorts to belligerence to prove and impose its “greatness” on the world. The myth of “American exceptionalism” serves to justify its innumerable crimes against humanity.
Consequently, American culture is pathologically obsessed with war and death. It thrives on the false claims that its “just wars” generate peace and its legal lynching generates justice. Both claims amount to perpetual wars and serial killing.
Outside of the narrowed American mind, it is considered common sense that capital punishment fails to function as a deterrent.
Its moral flaws and systemic failures disqualify it as a legal instrument. All it can do is miscarry justice and wage revenge to satisfy a savage human instinct that belongs to the past.
Once it is recognized for what it is — torture and murder — there is no defense. It must be abolished.
The torture of capital punishment does not begin and end with the actual execution, regardless of how it is carried out, which in all cases — blunt, brute or sophisticated (scientifically sanitized) — is a monstrosity.
Troy Davis spent half of his life of 42 years on death row. The destructive and agonizing effects on the human psyche are unimaginable by those who mindlessly cheer for the death penalty.
The fact that Troy Davis was most likely an innocent man is almost beside the point, were it not for this nation, where innocent and guilty alike get sentenced and executed, and where the execution of the innocent is one of the few arguments against the death penalty acknowledged by death penalty supporters.
This country’s leading executioners, former President Bush and President-Wannabe Perry, not coincidentally previous and current governors of the state of Texas, which boasts the greatest number of executions in the United States, could testify to the dire truth. They could, if they had a conscience.
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After Troy Davis, anyone can be executed based on false testimony, especially if one is black. The discriminatory and disproportionate application of the death penalty to minorities is a relic of a racist past. It’s as if Germany had kept some of its gas chambers to keep killing Jews.
The American (in)justice system decided to accept a few false accusations over many exonerating testimonies. Judges and politicians knew what they were doing. Since they could not prove Troy’s guilt, they demanded he prove his innocence, which is impossible. No one can prove a negative. They wanted him dead rather than free — a clear case of murder.
Joachim L. Oberst
UNM faculty
