On May 20th, 1987, Edward Earl Johnson, one of the overwhelmingly disproportionate number of African Americans awaiting execution on death row, was put to death in a gas chamber in Mississippi. He had been the subject of a BBC Documentary, Fourteen Days in May, which had intimately captured the final two weeks of his life, right up until a few moments before his execution.

Much has been made of Johnson’s alleged innocence, but what struck me most when watching this man just a few moments before he was sent to die, was the utter indignity and inhumanity of his fate. More recent cases, such as the execution in California of former gang leader Stanley Williams, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, have only reinforced in my mind the moral bankruptcy of capital punishment in the United States.

Supporters of the death penalty say that it is an instrument of justice. They point to the brutality of the crimes committed. They say it makes our streets safer. No doubt, we can think of some British criminals who would qualify for American justice. But what does it say about a country if it views murder as justice? That is, after all, what we are talking about.

It may go by a different name, but the state-sponsored, organised murder of criminals in gas chambers is no different from the acts committed by the inmates of death row. In a way, it is even worse. It means that murder is sanctioned by the law. And if the American conception of justice is ‘an eye for an eye’, then we are really just talking about revenge.

And they are not one and the same. The aim of justice is to set a precedent of behaviour different from that of the criminal. It is diametrically opposed to acts of murder, rape, robbery, or anything else, because these are unacceptable within society. Justice should be geared towards enforcing the idea that these things are morally wrong. The aim of revenge, on the other hand, is to do to the criminal what they have done to others. It has no regard for upholding societal values. It only enforces the notion that murder is acceptable.

And what happens to the moral character of a nation that legally sanctions murder? High school shootings, prolific gang warfare, and abnormally high murder rates spring to mind. I am not seeking to establish a direct link here. High school shootings do not, of course, occur as a direct response to any particular execution. The impact upon society is far more subtle than that. It is the sort of thing that permeates the national moral consciousness over time. It creates a code of behaviour that contributes to the acceptance of violence in American society.

Though some states have abolished the death penalty, they are in a small minority. Although in many other regards, I find myself a strong supporter of America, it is almost alone among first world nations in practising capital punishment, and shares its policy with corrupt and despotic regimes the world over. For now, little can be done. America’s violent love affair will continue so long as it enjoys the support that it does. But for the inmates of death row, too many of them black, too many of them innocent, the moral bankruptcy will continue. Murderers will see revenge rather than justice, and American society will continue into the twenty-first century as if it were still in the nineteenth.

Filed under: andrewnoakes, crime, racism, uspolitics on November 20th, 2007