Freddie Owens. Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams. Travis Mullis. Emmanuel Littlejohn. Alan Miller.
Five men, all of them executed over the previous seven days. The last time we had so much state-sponsored killing was in 2003. It has been a horrific week, and I suspect you feel the same heaviness that all of us at EJUSA carry.
I reject every execution, every death sentence, any and every form of violence that serves as punishment for a harm committed. But I need to talk about Khaliifah and Emmanuel.
Oklahoma killed Emmanuel yesterday—not because he killed anyone but because he was present during a robbery during which someone was killed. This law is called felony murder and it is responsible for some of the most egregious injustices of our time.
This past Tuesday, Missouri killed Khaliifah despite compelling DNA evidence that he was innocent of the murder that put him on death row…despite the prosecuting office that secured his conviction in 2001 petitioning the courts to overturn that conviction…despite more than one million people urging the governor to stop a gross miscarriage of justice.
How is it possible that we live in a country that can kill one innocent man and another who didn’t kill anyone, in the span of a week?
Dehumanization makes it possible.
Dehumanization made slavery possible. It made lynchings possible, followed by Jim Crow laws and systemic oppression. And dehumanization has made it possible for the U.S. to put more people in prisons and jails than any other nation.
Our criminal legal system was designed to disregard and ignore the humanity of the people it punishes. This belief that some of us are unworthy and disposable shows up throughout the system, but it is glaring in the death penalty.
Someday we will end the death penalty in this country. I hope you believe that as much as I do. But that is not enough.
We have changed laws and policies, but that doesn’t erase the anti-blackness weaved into the fabric of this country. Anti-blackness, classism, and other forms of division makes dehumanization and all that follows it easy.
We have to change hearts. We have to embrace the truth that every one of us is human, has dignity, and deserves grace and love. We have to care for every one of our neighbors and want for them the same healing we would want for ourselves when we hurt.
In honor of each of these men whose lives were taken, I hope we can work together to change hearts, even if it’s one at a time.
