Dylann Roof (Photo by Grace Beahm-Pool/Getty Images)
Yesterday, Dylann Roof got the death penalty for walking into a church, being accepted by the African-American congregation, and then murdering them. And once again, America has to look itself in the mirror and consider its comfort with what Justice Blackmun called “the machinery of death.”
Most people are going to be pretty cool with it today.
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And why wouldn’t they be? Finally, we’ve got someone who deserves the death penalty. A nasty little s**tbag who literally got Burger King after he killed nine innocent people (even if he didn’t actually get driven there). Eric Garner gets killed for selling cigarettes and this mass murderer gets a burger. That pretty much sums up justice in America.
Maybe this will balance the scales just a bit.
It won’t, of course, but that’s how the argument goes. Fundamentally poisoned systems rely on moments like this to thrive — it’s what keeps the whole affair from collapsing under its own weight. Offing the unrepentant killer who absolutely, positively murdered these people provides that neat and tidy legitimization of America’s barbaric and racist fascination with the death penalty. Roof is a sacrifice at the altar of the death penalty to forgive all of its sins.
Never mind that nationally, African-Americans are around three times more likely to end up on death row than demographics would suggest, while other killers are more likely to be shunted off into punishments with a longer life expectancy. Or that miscarriages of justice are supercharged in capital cases because the death penalty is an irrevocable punishment that doubles down on the often racially driven failures of the criminal justice system writ large. Occasionally you can get a few people to focus on these problems. Mostly when innocent folks get exonerated years after the fact and get high-profile media coverage. Those stories plant seeds of doubt in the minds of the public. You can actually see the polls start ever so slightly to shift.
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But now, bad people are getting what they deserve again! Who can take any death penalty critic seriously when the face of death row is no longer someone like Glenn Ford — innocent man exonerated after 30 years — but Dylann Roof? Just watch that support for the death penalty tick right back up again. It’s the life cycle of injustice — nobody cares about the doing the right thing when it helps the wrong people.
That’s why this sentence is ultimately a tragedy. Dylann Roof deserves the worst punishment imaginable. But, as they say, it’s not what you do, it’s what you justify. And sentencing Roof to death is going to justify a whole lot of state-sponsored injustice.
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.