We're killing Gary Graham today

June 22, Dallas, Texas

We're killing Gary Graham today, but I'm late for my flight to Denver. I'm speeding down a Dallas freeway, driving too fast for my own good. I turn on the radio for a traffic report; instead I hear what I've been dreading for days: Gary Graham's appeals to the State of Texas have been exhausted. We're killing Gary Graham today. The news hits me like a fist in the guts, it's predictability somehow aggravating, not alleviating, the anger and pain. And yet on I rush to the airport, moving dangerously past slow-moving cars, because I'm late for my flight to Denver.

I'm in the terminal now, I'm going to catch my flight to Denver; but we're still killing Gary Graham today. I see him on CNN, talking about what it's like to be a poor, black man in Houston, my hometown. Around me sit hundreds of my fellow citizens, as placid and indifferent as a dairy herd. Gary Graham isn't the only person who'll die in Texas today, most of whom, perhaps, are better people than Gary Graham, a man who was violently criminal before his incarceration twenty years ago.

And yet Gary Graham's death is unique, certainly not because he's the most praiseworthy -- or most blameworthy -- person who'll die today in Texas, but because he's the only person that we are, that I am, killing today. I am killing Gary Graham today. Most Texans don't know -- or knowing, don't care -- that when the State of Texas kills a poor man, we are all killing a poor man; that what the State does, it does in the name of every citizen. Surely this ignorance or indifference is the crucial social ground upon which capital punishment rests.

Today we killed Gary Graham, all of us, every one.