Having commented on the death penalty once already on this blog, I feel that I should expound somewhat: Texas will soon be executing Lawrence Brewer, a white supremacist convicted of assisting in the death-by-dragging-behind-a-truck of a black man in 1998.
Assuming he's guilty, I have no problem with the notion of the government killing this dude.
Meanwhile, a black man, Troy Davis, is set to be executed tonight after being convicted of killing a cop. Al Sharpton has taken up his cause, to the point of holding a vigil outside of the prison this afternoon.
Assuming he's guilty, I have no problem with the government killing this dude, either.
The problem I do have, is that I have not met either of these gentlemen. I know nothing about their cases beside the broadest of strokes. But even if I'd sat on either of their juries, knew their cases inside and out, I would still not know beyond the shadow of a doubt whether they were guilty.
Yet after looking over both situations for a grand total of five minutes...I find myself far more certain that the white supremacist is guilty. I know how skewed the courts are against black men, especially when they're accused of killing a cop, and I also know that white supremacists are human garbage and that Texas doesn't exactly represent an enlightened state of race relations. So my gut tells me that the white guy's a guilty piece of shit, and the black guy is the victim of a biased system.
I am against the death penalty because juries are made up of people with guts. And I don't want anyone to die - anyone - for the sole reason that deep down, I just don't like them.
I wonder how Al Sharpton feels about Lawrence Brewer.
No comments:
Post a Comment