To Sleep Through the Night

I can't say that I'm against the death penalty. I only know that I love my children so much that I feel that the person who should become so wrapped up in evil and carry out the act of ultimate theft, murder, should be called upon to surrender his ghost, after a trial, on a specific date, at a specific time. May Allah the Merciful forgive me if I'm wrong.

What gives me pause is the number of times a man, generally a Black American man, has been selected to be without a lifetime of freedom and have, at a later date, evidence which proves that a jury saw Black skin and only cared, in the next thought, for what would be served for lunch. It seems as if looking at a Black person gives one permission to no longer have tongue and knee pressed into the service of the Creator.

That's the essence of my curiousity. How a judge can pass sentence. How an attorney can withhold evidence. How a jury can have no interest in truth. And how all three passes that night, that first night, and all the nights to follow in the comfort of slumber when a life sentence or a death penalty has been the work of a day. How do you sleep knowing what is hidden in a drawer or when you have witnessed a liar using his words to ensnare a neck with a hangman's noose? Tell me how you can just kill a man because I am very interested in the turning of this trick.

A Black child is missing. No one cares. A Black woman cries violation. No stalwart defense arises. A Black man is on trial for murder and rape of a body which has never been found. A White man has claimed that he has leapt from tall edifices into a seething, swirling, predictably fatal body of water below and no harm came to his person. The story is believed. The infant is not missed. The cries are drowned out by the next story on the evening news. There's something wrong with our collective conscious when these things happen on a regular basis and yet we do not take to the streets as American were wont to do.

Americans have taken to the streets to burn bras. And they have taken their case to the streets for fair wages. An elected official can raise his voice to the President of the United States, “You lie!” and yet it seems that all but a precious few of God's emissaries are able to make a squeak when it comes to the abysmal record of our country's predilection with capital murder. I believe in the death penalty but I do not believe in the process which builds to that last moment when the man is prepared for his murder. He is led down a hall. He is strapped to a table. His body is covered up to the neck with a sheet. A grandmother with a nursing degree and a an uncle who has taken a centuries' old oath are on hand to send the falsely accused and wrongly convicted to the arms of a waiting, weeping, watching Father.

And still, the guilty parties, sleep. How can you kill a man?