So last night, Georgia executed Troy Davis with only a semblance of justice. My Twitter stream exploded in outrage while Michelle Malkin tried to trend the name of the murdered officer, Mark McPhail. Amid the firestorm, however, I could only go to Google and type in the name Lawrence Russell Brewer (right). Seeing that the white supremacist had been executed for the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. last night, I could not shed tears.
To be sure, capital punishment has been applied in America with sociopathic disregard for justice…but then again, there’s always David Riley, for whom I will not shed tears either, and Tracy Scott Lyndon, who only served one year for pushing a man off a 12-story balcony. If neither breathed another day, I would sleep fine. If there is a hell, they deserve to burn in it forever.
We often speak of criminal justice in the ideal. We imagine that a system should be capable of always discovering the truth and adjudicating fairly. But there is no such thing as perfect justice in this world; often, we are left to cry for better justice than we’ve received.
