Moral Confusion

Last night, after endless appeals, delays, and last-minute please, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis. Mr. Davis was convicted of murdering Mark MacPhail, an off-duty Savannah police officer in 1989, with nine eyewitnesses attesting to his guilt. As time passed, seven of those nine recanted their testimony, many claiming coercion by the Savannah police into naming Mr. Davis.

Last night, after about a decade on Death Row, Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed for killing James Byrd, Jr. in 1998 by dragging the man behind his pickup truck with a 24-foot chain. Brewer was widely known as active in white supremacist groups, and DNA tests concluded that Mr. Byrd’s blood was present on Brewer’s clothes the following day.  

Two executions, held on the same night, in many ways mirror images of one another, had me thinking as I lay in bed this morning. There was no way I could make sense of these tandem punishments, meted out so randomly, at the will of individual judges, juries, and witnesses. How can we be sure that someone deserves death? Why does either victim’s family need someone else to die in their name?

I am not pious enough about the sanctity of life to believe that death is too steep a punishment for some particularly evil people. But for something so ultimately binary, so utterly irreversible, I want the explanations for why it should happen to be equally unequivocal, and completely irrefutable. I do not think that human perception or human justice is really capable of doing this the right way every time. None of us are above our motives and urges.

We all think we know who is good and who is evil. We try earnestly to build wise institutions for formalizing this knowledge. But whether it is life, death, or parole, we fool ourselves into thinking that true justice can ever come from a court. No grieving family has the right to act out their callow need for vengeance through the state. Vindication for the innocent never comes from a judge’s gavel, but from the judgment of other living people, and the historians who later study dusty, faded accounts. Maybe it only comes from God.

Two executions on the same night. Two stories that couldn’t be more different. Four families, each walking away from the execution chamber with their own mixes of relief, anger, sadness, righteousness, indignation, pride, hope, and despair.  Did anybody living this morning get what they wanted out of these executions? Maybe. But did they deserve what they got?