My Freshman Year of College, I Met Sister Helen Prejean, who Wrote “Dead Man Walking.”

My college was performing a stage version of the book, and I accidentally enrolled in the class thinking it was a class to fulfill my DCM credit. I was responsible for dramaturgy.

Before that, I don’t think I had too much of a stance on the death penalty. I remember being extremely upset when Stanley “Tookie” Williams was executed because I believed the good work he had been doing to cease gang violence and promote peace was worth his life being spared. I knew it was wrong in some sense, but as an 18-year-old freshman, I didn’t have a clue.

However, after reading the book, and the play, seeing the play performed night after night, and having lunch with Sister Helen, I knew what I believed. Murder is murder no matter if a person is committing it or an institution is sanctioning it. The judicial system is not as much about facts as it is spinning the best story about said facts. So when a life is hung in the balance based on who can tell a story better, how is that justice?

If I killed Soulja Boy for killing my mother, I would still be arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned, but if the state kills an inmate, a human being, for allegedly killing another, that’s justice?

The death penalty is not justice. It’s revenge; it’s retribution. It’s flawed eye-for-an-eye logic. It purports that everything in the justice system goes correctly. It assumes that humans have the power to decide who lives and who dies. It feigns as if everything in this world is just or that issues like class and race don’t affect the justice system, because honestly, how many white men have been condemned to die by the state for the murder of anyone black? Go ahead, I’ll wait.

That three-week class changed my life, made me more appreciative of the gift of life, made me realize how incapable humans are of determining right from wrong, justice from injustice, logic from instinct.

Humaneness from beastliness.

The death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment. It’s wrong. It’s racialized; it’s classized; it’s deplorable; it’s inhumane.

In the name of Troy Davis, make it stop.

Now.