There were three executions last week, but only one was really publicized. Reflections on Lethal Injection

When I was a young collegiate existentialist, I read Camus on my own, he was not assigned as much then. I found his fatalism attractive, but I was drinking a lot then.

Camus committed his own capital punishment on himself in his sports car.

________

Of the three executions last week, only one was protested and covered widely by the anti-death penalty news.

Could the race of one of these murderers have had anything to do with the anti-capital punishment crowd? Not completely.

Here is the roster of executions (thanks to John Derbyshire for distilling the crimes and criminals so succinctly):

"Lawrence Russell Brewer is absurdly described in the news stories as a "white supremacist" as if he'd written scholarly tomes on the subject or founded a political party. In fact Brewer was an illiterate low-life who'd taken up his racial identity when in jail, for reasons of survival. He committed a horrible crime, though, and it's a disgrace that it took twelve years to give him what he deserved. Aged 44, Lawrence Russell Brewer died by lethal injection Wednesday evening. Of his co-defendants, one is still on death row, one is serving life.

Troy Davis, this week's second executee, was minding his own business, pistol-whipping a homeless man in the parking lot of a Burger King in Savannah, Georgia when an off-duty cop, Mark MacPhail, working as a security guard there, attempted to intervene. Davis shot MacPhail in the head. After MacPhail fell to the ground, Davis shot him again. That was in 1989, when Davis was 20.

There is some disputed evidence that MacPhail may in fact have been the second person Davis had shot that evening. There had been a road rage incident earlier, when one Michael Cooper was shot through the face — by Davis, said some witnesses. However, Cooper said in courtroom testimony during Davis's trial that, quote, "he don't know me well enough to shoot me."

In the twenty years since he was found guilty and sentenced to death, Troy Davis's case was scrutinized by every level of judicial appeal up the the U.S. Supreme Court — twice, in fact. None of the panels, boards, and courts who went over the case across those twenty years could come up with a majority fiinding of reasonable doubt. So the execution went ahead.

Race-wise, the Troy Davis case was a mirror image of the Lawrence Russell Brewer case: Davis was black, his victim white. In other respects the cases are dissimilar. Brewer committed an act of horrible cruelty; Davis's crime was probably impulsive. The racial element is plain in the case of Brewer, whose jail experiences had taught him to hate and fear blacks. Troy Davis, who likely shot a black man earlier in the evening, seems to have been an equal opportunity psychopath.

The Troy Davis case attained world-wide publicity, with movie stars, rap singers, sports celebrities, and even at one point the Pope, begging for Troy Davis to be shown clemency. For reasons which I shall leave you to figure out for yourselves, Lawrence Russell Brewer received no celebrity support at all. Many, many people claim to have minded Troy Davis's execution very much; practically nobody minded Lawrence Russell Brewer's.

The third execution this week, late Thursday, was of Derrick O'Neal Mason. Back in 1994, when he was 19, Mason held up a convenience store. The only person in the store was clerk Angela Cagle, age 25. Mason took her in a back room, told her to strip naked and lie on a table, then he assaulted her in some undetermined fashion before shooting her twice in the face. Mason is black, his victim was white, so this was only a routine local news story. Still it took 17 years to get justice for Angela Cagle."

The American Spectator : Reflections on Lethal Injection

By ROGER KAPLAN on 9.23.11

Albert Camus had no misunderstanding of the death penalty.

-excerpt-

...Camus's Réflexions sur la guillotine is perhaps the most famous modern polemic against the death penalty. It marshals most of the arguments that are lined up every time the topic comes up; proponents and opponents of state-sanctioned execution of criminals do little more, with varying degrees of eloquence, rational coherence, and emotional appeal, than repeat the arguments Camus made then and that he discussed with some of his friends and acquaintances as he went to work in 1956 and '57 on his classic piece.

Although, characteristically, Camus's reflections were profoundly informed by philosophical training that was deeply seeped, as befit a man of the Mediterranean, in classical Greek thought, it comes as no surprise that the decision to address the subject was motivated by personal anguish. Camus was haunted all his life, it comes up again in his late writings, by his own father's reaction to a public execution. Until after World War II, French penal authorities had the option of dressing the guillotine, the head-chopping machine invented during the French Revolution, as a humane improvement (as indeed it was, though Camus pointed out in his essay that it did not always work as advertised) over the methods used in previous times, which were quite deliberately designed to cause lasting horror in anyone who observed them. Notwithstanding, Camus's father, who was no opponent of the death penalty, was sickened by what he saw and transmitted his aversion to his son. Camus's father was killed at the front in September 1914. The memories Camus had of his father were those of very early childhood only, and he did not mind admitting that the shock caused by that public execution in Algiers was one of the most indelible.

In the mid-1950s, Camus was concerned that the execution -- within prison walls by now -- of Algerian terrorists (freedom-fighters by their own lights, or mujahideen, as they referred to themselves) was politically counter-productive, quite apart from indefensible on rational grounds. He did not deny the morality of "an eye for an eye" justice, but he argued that it never worked out that way. In the spiraling violence in his country, every shooting of a French policeman, every search-and-destroy mission against the commando responsible, every bomb in a European café killing civilians, every retaliatory dynamiting of a house in the casbah by white vigilantes, contributed, as Camus well saw, to a situation increasingly impermeable to any sort of discussion of compromise and reform between the belligerent parties. He had been pleading for such discussion since the late 1930s when in his earliest reporting (for the communist paper Alger-Républicain) he said the unjust colonial conditions in Algeria, based on self-serving lies (officially Algeria was not a colony), created a ticking time bomb.

-read on at above link-