(Also published at The Agonist)
HUNTSVILLE, Texas — White supremacist gang member Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed Wednesday evening for the infamous dragging death slaying of James Byrd Jr., a black man from East Texas. Byrd, 49, was chained to the back of a pickup truck and pulled whip-like to his death along a bumpy asphalt road in one of the most grisly hate crime murders in recent Texas history…. Brewer, 44…glanced at his parents watching through a nearby window, took several deep breaths and closed his eyes. A single tear hung on the edge of his right eye as he was pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m., 10 minutes after the lethal drugs began flowing into his arms, both covered with intricate black tattoos. Byrd’s sisters also were among the witnesses in an adjacent room.
I’d been living in Texas for a little bit less than a year when James Byrd was murdered. The details of the crime make it one of the most heinous, gruesome, and inexplicable crimes that a human mind could come up with. How one can chain a human being to the bumper of a truck with a 24 1/2-foot logging chain and then drag that person for three miles down an isolated logging road simply defies rational understanding. The depth of cruelty and inhumanity required to visit that sort of violence upon a human being is something I can’t even begin to comprehend. As much as I inflexibly and unalterably oppose the death penalty, if ever a crime was worthy of the ultimate punishment, the murder of James Byrd would qualify. The execution of Lawrence Russell Brewer closes one chapter of this story. John William King was also convicted of capital murder, and his death sentence remains on appeal. Shawn Berry received a life sentence. With any justice, Berry will never walk this Earth a free man.
I hate the death penalty for it’s often capricious and casual application. African-Americans are far more likely to be executed than Whites, often because the quality of representation afforded African-Americans is inferior. Prosecutors and police can fabricate evidence and intimidate witnesses, allowing for the execution of those who culpability may be legitimately in question (e.g.- Cameron Willingham). Too often, the death penalty is the satisfaction of popular bloodlust, the sating of a desire for revenge. This isn’t to denigrate the suffering of those who’ve lost loved ones, but I find myself wondering if state-sanctioned murder can really bring closure? I can’t begin to answer that question, because I’ve never lost a loved one to a murder. I realize that objectivity can be difficult to come by when it comes to seeking justice for the murder of a loved one. Still, I can’t bring myself to accept the argument that an eye for an eye does anything except make the whole world bling and create a very expensive, lengthy, and highly questionable attempt at creating justice.
Having said that, I realize and understand that some crimes are so horrific, so beyond the pale, and so inhuman that execution might seem both reasonable and appropriate. The question I can’t even begin to answer, though, is where that line should be drawn. Certainly, the murder of James Byrd would seem to meet the criteria, and it’s difficult to credibly argue that those responsible for Byrd’s execution don’t deserve their own. My dilemma is with where this line should be drawn (if it can in fact be drawn), and with who gets to draw this line. I don’t pretend to be able to articulate a sensible, consistent, and righteous criteria to determine which crimes warrant the ultimate punishment. In a perfect world, we’d accept that two wrongs don’t make a right, no matter how horrific a crime may be. Here in the real world, though, we need to have a national conversation about how, or if, we can create a fair, thorough, airtight system for meting out the death penalty. Anything less than that would, in my mind, at least, render the death penalty a hypocritical exercise in frontier justice.
I don’t know that we can create a system that’s fair, accurate, and thorough enough that those we execute are undeniably and without question guilty of a horrific, heinous crime. Can we overcome our collective desire for retribution and create a system where the application of justice is emotionless, dispassionate, and appropriate? If we can’t, we really have no business employing the death penalty. If we can, perhaps we might just find that we don’t need to kill in order to punish those who kill. Either way, it’s time we began to honestly discuss what we feel needs to happen and we might best accomplish that. If we can’t, or won’t, have that conversation, then the decision will be left to those with their own axes to grind.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
