Public brutality brings on a personal death

Hold your breath, steel your heart and look away for one of our number dies today (Thursday, September 22).

Troy Davis

The U.S. pardons board on Tuesday rejected a last-ditch plea for clemency from death row inmate, Troy Davis. He will be put to death today at 9am by lethal injection at a prison in Jackson, south of Atlanta.
News’ readers may well be remote in geographical terms, but in a psychological sense, alarming close as if it is happening here in Shepparton, particularly if we allow ourselves to think about the rather brutal death of Davis.
Tired clichés about “state sanctioned murder” and “racial injustice” (Davis is black and the police officer it is alleged he murdered is white) leap to mind, but deeper issues about capital punishment warrant our attention, and thought.
Capital punishment had never troubled me much, one way or the other, until I read George Orwell’s “A hanging” and through that short essay he ignited in me a revulsion that another should, or could, die at my say so.

George Orwell

Orwell wrote about the “unspeakable wrongness” of hanging a man, in this case it’s a lethal injection, but the result, however, is the same.
An image from Orwell’s essay cemented in my thoughts emerges from a description of Orwell, then a police officer in India, walking to the gallows with the condemned fellow only to have the man step around a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet.
That very human thing was strangely important to a man who was just minutes from dying – that rich image lives with me, emphasizing the unnerving disconnect between what is human and death.
Capital punishment was finally abolished in all Australian states in 1984 and Ronald Ryan was hanged in 1967, finding a sad niche in our history to be the last to die at the direction of the state.
Considerable doubt exists about the guilt of Davis and even the former US president Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI have joined the campaign to spare his life, a life that ends today after more than two decades of legal manoeuvering.
Davis’s death will be witnessed by those required by law and with them will be the dead police officer’s widow and children.
As much as we might like, we can’t hide in the anonymity of the crowd as it is in fact the “crowd” that is putting Davis to death, not some impersonal piece of machinery.
Fortunately, Australians have shown the exceptional good sense to step aside from capital punishment and now, in another move that will further enhance our mental health, we need to consider our behaviour in the Middle East and how it equates with capital punishment.