I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

It’s 11:45am EST. Someone can still intercede in Georgia. But as a nation, we should not be here at all. Our criminal justice system and our process for deciding whom the state should kill (on top of the very idea that the state should be in the business of executing anyone at all) is irreparably broken. We appear prepared to kill an innocent man tonight, but even if Troy Davis were guilty, the state should not take his life. Justice is too unevenly dealt in this country, from birth and early life to deaths of many kinds: lives strangled by poverty and chronic illness or ground up in our war machine or snuffed out by circumstances that individuals cannot correct or escape, defined by insecurity of every kind, unsafe neighborhoods, underfunded schools, a shredded social safety net, polluted land, air and water that leave no possibility of health. All these add up to a yawning deficit of vital care and attention for people society as a whole has written off as “disposable.”

I am swamped today in office work and am always less eloquent than some and so I will lean on Andrew Cohen’s recent article for The Atlantic:

It is possible to separate the sins of the condemned from the subsequent sins of the justice system, and to demand more of the latter than of the former. Indeed, this goes to the very heart of the age-old notion of bringing a measure of dispassionate justice to high and low alike.

[W]e all lose when we allow our justice system to be perverted by passions, prejudice, and politics -- is what I believe has soured so many Supreme Court justices to the idea of capital punishment. It's part of what Justice Harry Blackmun meant in 1994 in Callins v. Collins, a case about the death penalty in Texas, when he declared that he would "no longer tinker with the machinery of death." The rest of that sentence is instructive as well:

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For
more than 20 years I have endeavored... to develop... rules that would lend more
than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor... Rather
than continue to coddle the court's delusion that the desired level of fairness
has been achieved... I feel... obligated simply to concede that the death
penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no
combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the
death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies...

EDITED TO ADD: I didn’t know Troy Davis’s name, or that of Mark McPhail, the man he is convicted of killing, until, maybe, a week or two ago. (McPhail was twenty-seven; his widow believes Davis is guilty.) I didn’t know what he looked like, and now his face is everywhere—the portrait of a man who is going to die at 7 P.M. today. We can and do delegate that task, to juries and appellate judges and clemency boards, but that’s no absolution. They are human operations, and the point of having advocates and watchdogs is to let us know when they—we—have made a mistake. They have tried desperately to do so in this case. Capital punishment imposes an obligation on all of us: to stop what we are doing and, somewhere between lunch and the end of work, figure out whether we think a man we don’t know at all killed someone, and deserves to be killed. Is that an impossible task? Then maybe execution is an impossible punishment.

Amy Davidson for The New Yorker.







The idea of everyone waiting, the condemned man strapped down, the staff instruments in hand, the witnesses behind glass, all eyes on a clock, for 7:00 seems so wildly unnatural, so sterile. What else do you wait for in this way, knowing the hour and the minute? So much of life (and death) is not knowing. Waiting for the birth of a child who will make his entrance on his own time, waiting for the final breath at the end of a long illness. When have I sat and counted each tick of the second hand, waiting for the minute to roll over? Only New Year's Eve. If this execution goes forward, let 7:01, 7:02, whenever the terrible act is done, be the end of the death penalty in America and the start of something new.