Nota Bene before murdering

Troy Davis, who was convicted of killing a police officer in Savannah, Ga., 22 years ago, was executed on Sept. 21. Troy's conviction was not based on any physical evidence - no murder weapon was found -- according to an article from The Guardian.

Seven of the nine witnesses who testified against Davis recanted their testimonies, several who claimed to have been coerced by policemen during the investigative process, according to the article.

As a result of a gross lack of evidence and at the plea of many, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu and Pope Benedict XVI, Troy's execution date was postponed three times before he was finally put to death last Wednesday.

Troy's fate paints a sad portrait of Lady Justice peering beneath a crack in her blindfold, sword bloodied, scale still tottering.

However, for those of us not forced to lock eyes with injustice at every moment of the day, the headline of a dozen men massacred, much less one dead, is, as French author Albert Camus wrote, "no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination." And we move on to our daily chaos, classes and work.

Perhaps, at the least, we mention the absurdity as it drifts across the bottom of a television screen in D-hall. As we sit comfortably with a tray of food before us, the fleeting images are not strong enough to make our stomachs go sour, if they could have ever managed to do so at all.

The image for me still stings and before it recedes and vanishes, I feel obliged to write something. It is not possible to address all facets of a death sentence about which volumes have been written.

Nor do I wish only to discuss the specifics of this case. I would, however, like to reference a few points made by Camus in his classic essay, "Reflections on the Guillotine."

Camus writes, "An odd law, to be sure, which knows the murder it commits and will never know the one it prevents."

Perhaps the foremost argument in favor of the state's right to its own laws concerning premeditated murder is the appeal to deterrence: it is not only necessary to punish, but also to intimidate others from murdering. This would be a strong case, Camus notes, if we were able to ignore the fact that not even society believes in this "exemplary value" of capital punishment.

If the state was not afraid of this objection, it would execute men before crowds in Times Square or on an afternoon at the National Mall. This is your fate if you so choose to murder. Such a thought seems barbaric.

"At most, [capital punishment] serves the purpose of periodically informing the citizens that they will die if they happen to kill -- a future that can be promised even to those who do not kill," according to Camus.

Capital punishment is not a deterrent. If you kill, you can expect to be held for years, escorted in and out of courtrooms until an execution date is settled and there are no more appeals. You will have your last meal, walk down a few corridors until you reach a white room on your left where you will, ideally, drift off into a sleep from which you never awake. Give us 20 minutes or so to find a vein.

Many murderers, Camus notes, do not wake up planning to commit murder. The only way to warn them of their future crime and truly deter them from taking another's life later that day would be to sit a severed head beside their cup of coffee in the morning.

And on the other hand, there is the premeditated murder. "How could cupidity, hatred, jealousy fail to do what love of a person or a country, what a passion for freedom manage to do?" Camus asks. But for those who know full well in advance they will or may very likely be the author of such an act, the fear of death is of secondary importance.

"There is no proof that the death penalty ever made a single murderer recoil when he had made up his mind, whereas clearly it had no effect but one of fascination on thousands of criminals," he writes.

If society truly believed in the death penalty's value as a deterrent, it would not be afraid to wave the heads of the executed in the face of its people for the very purpose of deterrence.

Fortunately, we are spared this sight and, out of decency, barbarity is kept behind closed doors.