The Atlanta spa shooter shouldn't face the death penalty for a hate crime
Using the Atlanta spa shootings case to further entrench the death penalty in our nation and in our lives will only hurt us.
By Chris Geidner, MSNBC Opinion Columnist
On Tuesday, Atlanta’s recently elected district attorney, Fani Willis, announced that she would be seeking the death penalty and hate crimes penalty enhancements against Robert Aaron Long, the 22-year-old man charged in the Atlanta-area shootings at spas that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent.
Willis’ decision to seek the death penalty is the wrong one — both for her in particular and, as recent history counsels, in cases alleging bias-motivated violence more broadly.
While Willis might believe, as she said on Tuesday, that this is a case that “warrants” seeking the death penalty, advocates from more than a decade ago made clear the dangerous path such a decision can clear for “disproportionate application” of the death penalty “against poor people” and for the “unequal and racially biased application of the death penalty,” to say nothing of larger concerns about the use of the death penalty in any circumstance.
There is a long and well-detailed history showing the dangers the death penalty system poses to people who cannot afford better representation. According to a statement from the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal rights group founded by Bryan Stevenson, “The death penalty is mostly imposed on poor people who cannot afford to hire an effective lawyer.” Death row is, almost exclusively, a home for the poor.
As the institute and many others have detailed, race is inextricably intertwined with the death penalty as well. In one particularly clarifying report, the institute studied the history of racial terror lynchings in America and found that their decline “relied heavily on the increased use of capital punishment imposed by court order following an often accelerated trial.”
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Sunday, May 16th 2021 at 9:23PM
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