Another innocent man has been legally murdered in America. It wasn’t “the legal system”—let’s for once dispense with that personal responsibility-denying bit of reification. People did it. People without conscience or scruple, for whom Troy Davis’ innocence is utterly irrelevant.
Beneath the claims of an-eye-for-an-eye justice, primitive but at least cloaked in a crude morality, we can now see plainly what has been there all along.
Troy Davis is dead because too many Americans enjoy the idea of killing, especially when it’s risk-free:
From Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who stated that Davis’ “actual innocence” doesn’t matter, to his colleagues who kept the terrified man strapped to a gurney for more than four hours awaiting their collective legal shrug, to the cheering bloodthirsty goons in the clip just above, to the various ‘baccy-chawing racists infesting Jaw-Ja state institutions, the goal was to snuff out the life of a human being, preferably a Black one, not for justice but for pleasure.
That was the true motive for most if not all lynchings, Jaw-Ja leading every other state but Mississippi in that regard. Just give those crackers a reason.
And the reason, of course, was usually unserious: some trivial event held to transgress custom or law, usually on the part of Blacks. A facade of justice and morality barely concealed what was in fact pure blood-lust. Anyone reading the details of lynchings—the often minor offences that gave rise to them, followed by a hunt and then, in not a few cases, hours of torture in front of happy crowds—is incapable of believing that any notion of justice, even the eye-for-an-eye kind, had anything to do with these events.
Of course the same sadistic pleasure was the motive lurking behind all other motives when executions and torture were once popular public spectacles: mediaeval witch-burnings, for example, or prolonged and gruesome deaths from being broken on the wheel or hanged, drawn and quartered.
Discipline, Michel Foucault reminds us, is more effective than punishment to secure order in a society. But order, in whatever twisted manner that notion is conceived, is clearly not all that there is at stake here.
Because Troy Davis was innocent. Everybody knew it.
The Jaw-Ja Department of Corrections, desperately trying to maintain the facade, denied the condemned man a polygraph test earlier today. It would just have complicated things. More proof of innocence shouldn’t get in the way of a good lynching.
Everybody knew there was far more than “reasonable” doubt that Davis was guilty. But—and this bears repeating—innocence doesn’t matter. We have the word of no less than a sitting judge of the Supreme Court of the United States.
There is no justice here, and no mercy. When all is said and done, a person was put to death to please a crowd.
All that is ever needed is a rationale, no matter how flimsy. The sham of a legal process used to lynch Troy Davis allows people to ignore their own dark motives, to feast without qualm upon those elements of public spectacle our civilized institutions currently permit us to retain.
A victim, any victim, will do, but preferably poor and Black.
The USA—or, more properly, a host of barbaric Americans playing their many toxic roles—claimed just such a victim a few minutes past 11:00 this evening.
