So I was sitting in the airport waiting for my plane and I was watching that dreaded CNN Headline News with this Velez-Mitchell woman screeching over this kid whose on trial in this home invasion case. For about 4 minutes or so, I couldn't understand why there needed to be such a discussion on a home invasion case. In fact, I couldn't get why it was even being covered, until it was finally mention that this 'home invasion' ended up with 3 people being murdered -- all female members of the same family and at least one of them -- an eleven year old, was raped before she was killed.
Velez-Mitchell noted that the defense was going to say that this kid didn't go into the home with the intent of killing anyone.
I dunno, but it sounds suspiciously close to Michael Jackson's doctor claiming that he didn't give the popstar enough Propofol that should have killed him....
Uh huh.
I found it interesting that there was this discussion going on in trying to understand the motivations of a white kid who was part of a gruesome mass family murder when no thought would have been given to a black kid being charged with murder for just being a passenger in a car where another passenger shot and killed someone from that car. I find this to be what is exactly wrong with this country with respect to criminal justice and race.
Can you imagine what the conversation would be if the kid that was involved in this home invasion case were black??? I shudder to think about it. Actually I don't.
Because that conversation is all too common already. Big bad black person kills/harms/does something BAD to a white person.
Or at least, that's the idea that has been ingrained in this society for eons now.
The very idea of a black man causing harm to a white person or in particular, a whilte woman or child is enough to get that black man killed.
Many so-called race riots around the 1900's were caused by the 'rumor' that some Negro man looked wrong at a white woman. Whether it was true or not didn't matter. That is was said, did and that act of saying so was enough to send out the lynch party.
Back then, they didn't wait for a trial.
Today, a trial is just a formality in some minds.
Until a few days ago, I didn't know who Troy Davis was. I still don't know much about his case, except that he was convicted of killing an off duty cop and was sentenced to death. He has had a few reprieves over the years, but in less than about 24 hours, he is to be executed by lethal injection.
I hope the State of Georgia knows what the hell it's doing.
I don't know if this man is innocent or not. Like I said, I don't know the particulars, but I've heard in passing about witnesses recanting, witnesses being coerced into pointing the finger at Davis, other witnesses coming forward and so on.
All I know is this. The very idea of executing a man whose true guilt or innocence is in question, despite the conviction, just doesn't sit well with me.
It's not like this country don't already have a pitiful history of convicting innocent black men and having many of them serve 15-30 years of their lives away before DNA scientifically rules that it was impossible for them to have committed the crimes they were accused of. A few of them have been on death row.
But in this day and age where a former Republican governor (whose in jail serviing time for crimes he committed in office), placed a moratorium on the death penallty because the State of Illinois had gotten it so terribly wrong, there is something very 1900's in the way this Davis thing is going down.
I know that this officer's family need to believe that this guy is guility.
I hope for their sake that he is.
But if he isn't the one, then I hope that they and the State of Georgia, can live with what they have done.
Or is about to do.
UPDATE I just, for the record of this diary, want to clarify something. My mentioning of the Petit Home Invasion/Murder trial was not to compare the crime to that of the Davis cop shooting case. I attempted to convey how the mainstream media characterizes race and crime. The Petit case was probably not the best example to use because the gruesomeness of this crime, regardless of who committed it, is pretty clear.