Metacentricities

Until yesterday, I’d been quite taken with my newly adopted state of California. The Bay Area seems to be a fun place to live. On my trip down to Santa Barbara for Thanksgiving, I had a real appreciation for the beauty and landscape of California.

But I was surprised to learn how different it is to live in a state that executes people. When you live in Massachusetts, that’s always happening elsewhere (like Texas, for instance.) You can feel superior, talk about how your state is more enlightened. You can be engaged in the national dialogue about it, go to protests, be involved in activism, but there’s still a distance, it still happens somewhere else, not here.

Living in California is different. Tookie Willams was executed 15 miles from where I live now.

There were all sorts of things that were complex in this case, but the truth is, I don’t care. I don’t care whether he was innocent or guilty, I don’t care whether or not he has been redeemed. I think we use those arguments to try and convince people that a particular person should be given clemency. I think we let those things get in the way of the real truth: we don’t have the right to kill someone, no matter what they have done, or how they have behaved. That’s what abolition means. Whether its the severely unequal way the death penalty is given, whether it’s that sometimes innocent people will die, whether it’s the hope of rehabilitation, whatever it is, those are important arguments, I guess, but they are, in some ways, beside the point. What matters is that the death penalty is wrong, period. Even if it could be guaranteed that no innocent person was ever executed. Even if we could be completely sure it was fairly given out by race and class. Even if we would make sure not to execute people who had become model prisoners. It still would be wrong. We used to know that, a while back, but we lost our way. It’s time to find our way back.

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