The killing of Troy Davis was racist legal lynching! In place of hooded KKK nightriders were pin-striped prosecutors and black-robed judges, along with the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which turned down Davis’s bid for clemency the day before the execution. In place of the lynch rope were needles dispensing the life-ending chemical cocktail. The substantial evidence of Davis’s innocence meant nothing. A white uniformed enforcer of capitalist law and order had been killed, and this black life had to be taken in return. Here is a stark demonstration of the workings of the capitalist state—an instrument of organized violence to protect the class rule and profits of the tiny handful of capitalists against the workers and the oppressed. The death penalty is the ultimate sanction of a “justice” system that is not only stacked against workers and the poor but also, in this society founded on slavery and maintained on a bedrock of black oppression, racist to its core.
P Legal professionals are responsoble for biased killings
P2 Instead of lynching the state authorizes killings Intravenously
P3 Substantial evidence proving Davis' innocence meant nothing
P4 An enforcer of oppression had been killed, in retaliation an oppressed person was killed.
P5 The capitalist state is an instrument of organized violence designed to perpetuate severe inequalities
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C In society where oppression is based on status, wealth, and ethnicity, the death penalty is the ultimate exemplification of such oppression, where the common notion of "justice" is distorted by state sanctioned murdered of the oppressed.
the institutional racism of our liberty loving land seems equally apparent to me too...still I would be interested to hear your feelings/thoughts as to the proximity or distance of the murderous and overt intentions of a roving mob to the ingrained biases of bureaucracies and social systems…the mechanics of the latter sometimes fall beyond the real intent of the individuals who compose them at times…
ReplyDeleteyet still there is what they say about how the road to hell gets paved…
a
nd if the end result is the same anyway it might not make a shred of difference anyway.
AJ- If you get a chance last semester I took CONTEMPORARY MORAL ISSUES with Dr. Nnoodim, who is a philosophy professor here…we read some incredible material and watched some jarring documentaries engaging some of your concerns here. HIGHLY recommended. He’s fantastic. Speaking of fantastic : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thin_Blue_Line_(film) – its not all Geronimo Pratts and Rodney Kings…although the alleged perpetrator was white in this killing of a police officer, as well as being a subtle if ringing expose of our “justice” system this documentary was instrumental in getting this guy off of death row. I can probably get a hold of a vhs copy if you young whippersnappers even know what that is.
Keep up the good posts!
-DG
The analogy may well be fairly weak. We have to watch out for such facile rhetorical comparisons, lest we take actual lynching too lightly.
ReplyDeleteSource?
PLEASE TURN OFF THE WORD VERIFICATION FUNCTION, AS IT MAKES COMMENTING UNNECESSARILY AWKWARD.
ReplyDeleteThis argument appears to be quite weak. Even though i know what point it is trying to get across, there is very little concrete evidence that supports the topic. I think you have pulled the premises and conclusion out of the argument correctly. The premises all come right from the text and the conclusion follows from the premises.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the weakness. But I have a hard time trying to put aside my thoughts on this when evaluating it. I do not see anything else that can be pulled out of the article, which contributes to it looking weak.
ReplyDelete