Demario Atwater may feel this more keenly than most. Atwater, 23, is one of two men accused of robbing and shooting UNC Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson in March 2008.
Federal prosecutors are seeking the needle. This week, Atwater’s attorneys filed reams of motions in Winston-Salem, asking a judge to take the death penalty off the table on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.
Killing people, they submitted, interferes with the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution.
It does, of course, but capital punishment has always been applied to citizens whose other Constitutional rights — liberty, for starters — are also in jeopardy. Our system’s punishments are all, in the end, about limiting or revoking some of the rights of citizenship. One example: In North Carolina, felons can’t vote while they’re in prison, on parole or on probation.
We are more interested in the part of Atwater’s motion that argues that capital punishment is applied with both racial and regional biases.
In other words, his lawyers said, federal prosecutors are more likely to seek capital punishment for black men in the South than for white defendants, or for defendants of either race in other parts of the country.
The Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project studied 435 federal death penalty cases since 1988. Of those, only 26 percent of the defendants were white. The American Civil Liberties Union did a similar study in 2007 and found that the chances of a federal case being authorized for the death penalty is 84 percent higher when the victim is white, regardless of the race of the defendant.
But we want to avenge Carson, the girl who didn’t deserve her death. This is exactly the case that tests our opposition to the death penalty, and righteousness — justice, vengeance — offers the comforting illusion of morality.
If this is a slow-motion march that ends with Atwater’s conviction, there will also be a grim, unpalatable irony: that the girl who didn’t deserve it died quickly and without appeal, and that the man who killed her was afforded the luxury of motions, appeals and, above all, time.
The unfairness of it all doesn’t excuse us from the hard questions.
Would Demario Atwater be facing the death penalty if he were not young, poor and black?
What if Eve Carson were not young, accomplished and white?
It is a fact, supported by data, that black, male defendants are more likely to face the death penalty than whites.
It is also a fact that the law exists to define which of our urges we may indulge, and which we may not.
Society en masse should not be above its own laws, or above scrutiny, even in cases like this, the ones that offer a horrible temptation to give in to our own, thinly veiled urge to kill.
We must not indulge it.
