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The Death Penalty in America.

Erkrath So we headed off to a party in mid-city, where many of New Orleans’ civil rights lawyers and activists would be gathered. I had woken up that morning in a swamp, hadn’t showered since leaving Venice two days ago, and now was talking to people who had tried cases before the Supreme Court. Conversation was mostly cocktail-party style, on topics of interest to lawyers – dealing with Louisiana’s legal system (based on the Napoleonic Code and not on English law, and hence utterly unlike the law in all other 49 states); the death penalty in Louisiana; Louisiana’s insane maximum-security prison, the old plantation known as Angola; funding for public defenders. Many of the members of this admirable little subculture came from other states and were young; I suspected that many would burn out, too. But there were a number of veterans who had stayed with it their whole lives, and they had about them the kind of contented dignity you find in all people whose lives are leavened with purpose: it is a kind of happy sadness, or perhaps a sad happiness, which I think of whenever I think of the Beatitudes. I remember hearing in church the word makarios in the Beatitudes translated as “happy” (the work, I believe of the New American Bible translation, now revised (thank goodness), a translation so spiritually false it could only have been approved by a group of modern Catholic bishops). “Happy are those who weep.” But I think the word is referring to this mixture of happiness and sadness that good people experience when they live with full knowledge of both their own goodness and badness. “Blessed” ends up being the only translation for it.

buy accutane online yahoo And this was especially true of a gentle black man I met at the party there, somewhere about fifty years of age, who seemed contented and happy but also deeply sad. I am always stopped in my tracks when I meet people like this – in a society so focused on material well-being, so convinced that there is no suffering but material privation, and so ashamed of unhappiness when in conditions of material prosperity, the people who have suffered and known and accepted their suffering as suffering stand out in every crowd. And his story was so unique that I had already heard it, and had heard that he would be at the party. So it did not come as any surprise to me when I found out that he had spent twenty-seven years in prison, twenty of them on death row, for a murder he almost certainly did not commit.

His name was Ndume Olatushani. He was very gentle and kind, and I had met people like that in prison before; but you do not need a particularly violent disposition to wind up in prison. Being young and stupid and keeping the company of firearms is often enough. He was already serving one sentence for attempted murder in a gunfight when he was extradited to Memphis to stand trial for a murder which had occurred shortly before he had gone to jail; he had never been in Memphis, however. The most salient of the key pieces of exonerating evidence is that the one person who directly accused him of the crime was a good friend of the person who probably did commit the murder. (A long profile, including details of the legal case, is here; Mr. Olatushani is also a successful artist).

I can’t say that he said anything terribly profound, and the situation was not suited to profundities: he had a young child running around the party that he had an eye on the whole time, and there were other people there he wanted to speak with more than me. But his presence greatly affected me.

The death penalty went into abeyance briefly in the 1970s (six men were executed by the state from 1976 to 1982), then peaked in 1999 at ninety-eight executions nationally, and has fallen off somewhat, averaging around fifty a year in the past decade. But almost three thousand men in this country await execution on what is called “death row.” Almost all of the executions in the country occur in the South: since 1976, four men have been executed in the Northeast; eighty-four in the West; one hundred sixty five in the Midwest; and one thousand one hundred twenty six in the South.

Each one of those deaths represents a state-sanctioned, deliberate, cold-blooded murder of a person who had no power to resist, even if guilty; and we may say that some of those people were assuredly innocent. As a lawyer told me, rather offhandedly (this was elsewhere, not at this party), “Do miscarriages of justice occur? Of course.” It is no light thing to imprison a man for twenty-seven years if he is innocent; but at least he may go free, and marry, and have children (as Ndume has). But you cannot breathe the life back into a corpse. If we know that we cannot judge without error, then we should also commit ourselves to a process that acknowledges this truth: that we might be wrong and we might need to rectify our mistake later. The death penalty is not consistent with such a system.

I know that there are many people, and life is in some sense cheap; I know that we may die from silly mistakes that we make, and nature itself does not seem to value our lives very much.  And I know that the lives of men, and black men in particular, have always been held particularly cheap; but still, standing in that room with that man who had been condemned to death, and seeing his beautiful child who would have died in his body when they killed him, I burned with shame, to think that we, as a people, see fit to judge on whether such a man will live or die, and judge so terribly wrongly.

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