Columnist Jamala Rogers
At 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, Dennis Skillicorn was killed by lethal injection. Earlier that evening, I stood in reflective silence with others as we always do before a State killing. During the candlelight vigil, my mind raced through dozens of images of how we take the lives of others in this country.
Earlier that day, I had attended the wake of Ebony Mitchell. Ebony, only 23 years old, her sisters and a cousin, were in the right place at the wrong time. Their car was hit as two vehicles engaged in a drag race. Ebony was killed upon impact while the car turned into a fiery tomb.
I’ve known Ebony since she was born, as I did most of the Mitchell children. They grew up in the youth program at the Rowan Community Center. Her family and friends didn’t deserve to lose their loved one in an act of reckless, self-gratifying individualism.
Everyday someone is dying at the hands of another human being. Are our lives so void of meaning that we don’t care to understand the consequences of our actions? Are we so disempowered that we derive personal power from the harm we do to others. Do we get gratification from seeing others suffering or dead because of our own miserable existence? These were some of my many thoughts that turned into a fast-paced video in my head.
Each day, a decision is made to take a life. It can be a violent as taking a shank to a fellow prisoner or as passive as not providing medical care for a needy patient. It is pilot not following protocol resulting in the deaths of passengers. It is drunk driver getting behind the wheel of a car. It is a husband strangling his wife and two sons. It is soldier spraying bullets at civilians he believes are the enemy. It is a drug dealer who sells death in pills, powder and liquid forms. It is a police trained to kill and ask questions later. It is boyfriend who throws his girlfriend’s crying baby against the wall to silence her. It is the robbers for whom it is not enough to take the money from a hard-working family business but feels compelled to take a life as they exit the scene.
For me, it is not the moment, the hour that Governor Jay Nixon decided not to commute the sentence of Skillicorn. It is not the second before the young men ran a red light in their victory lap. No. It is all the minutes in between. It’s not just the victim(s) and the perpetrator(s). It’s all of us in between. What are we doing and saying in the minutes and hours between the time someone finally takes a life—or attempts to take one? Do we enjoy a fleeting moment of satisfaction from someone else’s pain and circumstances because our own lives are so wretched and out of control? We will have to answer those questions for ourselves in terms of how we live our lives and how we value life itself.
Reggie Clemons is scheduled to die by lethal injection on June 17. I will be asking this community to come together to save his life and to remember the lives of Robin and Julie Kerry. The sisters lost their lives at the Chain of Rocks Bridge in 1991. The pursuit of truth has been blocked for over eighteen years. We have one last opportunity to know the truth and to fight for justice. What will we do in between time?