Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

A Message From The Publisher

    In 2018, the International Day of Love was forever changed for 17 families. A former student entered onto the campus of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School and opened fire with an AR-15, killing 17 and seriously injuring another 17. Fourteen high school students and 3 adults were gunned down like what you see in violent video games. An entire community was left paralyzed, and the world stopped for a few minutes to try to make sense of it all.

While this mass shooting and its raw numbers are horrendous, it is not the worse by mere body count. The mass shooter in the Sandy Hook shooting killed 26, 20 elementary aged children, mostly six and seven years old, and 6 adults. The most recent mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas took the lives of 21, 19 elementary students and two adults. It seems each time we characterize a school shooting as the deadliest in our history, the next year, one happens that’s even deadlier.

I have purposely avoided speaking much about the MSD mass shooting and the shooter, who I will call NC for the purpose of not even writing his name. I am a father who loves his children and have been a protector of them for as long as they have been alive. God chose me to give them life. For someone to then cut that life short in the way NC did, I cannot fathom what I would do and the level of prolonged rage I would feel and revenge I would seek.

Last week, the world waited in anticipation for the sentencing verdict for NC. 12 jurors heard testimony for months and a sole holdout kept him from getting the death penalty on the grounds that he is and continues to be mentally ill.

Another reason that I have not written much about this case is because I suffer from the same tone deafness that many people, especially whites suffer from when Black people cry out because of injustice. The parents, family members and community at large cried out in anguished frustration that that one juror could not see what they see clearly, and that one juror could not connect to their desperate need for justice via death, death, death. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. I heard things like: How could anyone not understand that animal (NC) deserves to die? If this is not a death penalty case, then what is?

Black people know this all too well. A police officer’s knee lingered on the neck of George Floyd for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, choking out his life in front of our eyes. Breonna Taylor lay asleep in her home and her life was taken in the middle of the night by police officers executing a warrant obtained under false pretenses, but their intensely directed actions left another Black person murdered. Trayvon Martin, a kid, was shot and killed trying to get home by an overzealous neighborhood watchman who was told by a 911 operator to stand back and wait for law enforcement. He didn’t and ultimately killed Martin. Ahmad Arbery was hunted down and cornered like an animal. When the flight option didn’t work, Arbery was forced to fight, and his life was taken. Rodney King was beaten to within inches of his life by law enforcement because of a traffic violation. Similar stories took the lives of Sandra Bland, Mike Brown, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Bothom Jean, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Daunte Wright, and this is NOT a complete list.

Similar cries for justice rang out for the deaths of these Black people. In response, you hear things like, “They should not be breaking the law. If they would have just obeyed the direction of the police.”

These Black people didn’t deserve to be gunned down for speeding or not obeying the police any more than students and teacher in a building where the former student was bullied or suffered from mental illness. The perpetrators at the hands of the deaths of these Black people deserve accountability in the same way that NC deserves accountability.

Yet, many of those who believe NC deserves the death penalty for the lives he took cannot empathize, use that same logic, or look through lens of justice for the life George Floyd and the other aforementioned Blacks.

On Tuesdays, I am usually preparing for the final edits of the weekly edition of the Westside Gazette. Sometimes I tune in to school board meetings and am often angry and sickened by what I hear. There was one particular board workshop a few years ago that I caught where the PROMISE program and student discipline were on the agenda. The PROMISE program was under attack and the general consensus was that we should not give these students (predominantly Black) ample opportunities for in school interventions before their offenses should be reported to law enforcement thereby influencing the “pipeline to prison”. This would negate the entire purpose of PROMISE. The PROMISE program was designed as a way to keep students who commit minor misdemeanor offenses out of the criminal justice system. Yet, the non-Black Board members seemed indifferent about saving the program. Dr. Rosalind Osgood and Robin Bartleman were the only Board members who spoke with any passion and purpose to save the program.

Within minutes, the meeting agenda switched over to students who were being arrested on campus for possession of vape devices and THC oil. In Florida, possession of THC oil is a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $5,000. The students who were being arrested for possession of THC oil were mostly affluent and White. The Board members woke up for this topic. I remember distinctly the desperate cries of Laurie Rich Levinson in defense of these students who she pleaded “have made a mistake” and that by arresting them “it would give them a criminal record that would negatively impact them for the rest of their lives”. She went on to speak about how these arrests would negatively impact them getting into college. Yet, only minutes before when the Board discussion item was about Black students being criminalized by the school to prison pipeline, she was mostly mute and seemed irritated by the lengthy discussion. I am sure it didn’t even cross Levinson’s mind that her advocacy, leniency and empathy around particular students was straight down racial and class lines.

My opinion about NC does matter even if I did not lose a child. Did he deserve the death penalty? Most likely.

For those who are against the death penalty for any reason whatsoever, then maybe they should never serve on a jury to decide the fate of someone who is under consideration for the death penalty. They cannot be impartial no more than politicians who believe that a woman shouldn’t be allowed to terminate a pregnancy at any stage, on the basis of rape or to save the life of the mother.

If you ask my opinion, I agree with those who say that if what NC did doesn’t warrant the death penalty, then what does? If there is any just reason for the death penalty, his actions rise to that level. But, I also believe that the police officer who stood on the neck of George Floyd’s for 9 minutes and 29 seconds also deserves a guilty verdict and a death sentence. I believe a community watchman who follows and kills a teenager after he has been told to stand down deserves to be found guilty of murder. I believe that three men who hunt a fleeing man and corner him like an animal deserve to be found guilty and given the death penalty. I believe police officers who secure a warrant under false pretenses and kill a woman in the execution of that ill-gotten warrant should be convicted of murder. I believe that if you go to the Capitol Building with sticks, clubs, knives, guns and other weapons and threaten to hang the vice president of the United States, and people died because of your actions, you should be charged and convicted of insurrection, treason and/or sedition, and you should suffer the harshest legal punishment there is.

But this is not consensus of the majority, and the difference goes straight down racial and political aspirations and affiliation lines. We are further apart as it relates to issues of race than we have ever been in this country.

The families of the victims in MSD couldn’t believe that there was one juror who didn’t see that justice for NC was the death penalty and only the death penalty. Black people see injustice and indifference like this in their personal lives, and it is played out on the national platform every day.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” 

—- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.