And killing Roof, like the business of the capital punishment itself, ensures that innocent people will be executed. In a country where unapologetic slaveholders and regressive white supremacists still, at this late date, adorn our state capitals and our highest institutions of learning, it is bizarre to kill a man who acted in their spirit. In this sense, Roof is little more than a human sacrifice to The Gods of Doing Nothing. The hammer of criminal justice is the preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas. Ta-Nehisi Coates aptly explained the trouble with a prosecutorial approach to violence in his criticism of the Obama Justice Department’s decision to seek the death penalty against Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who murdered nine members of a black church in Charleston, South Carolina: The system deserves the majority of the blame, but in the prosecution of Guyger, the system and its supporters have effectively shifted the blame to a single actor-avoiding accountability and ensuring more injustices are sure to come. It is, in many ways, a cop-out: it allows the unjust criminal legal system to capitalize off of legitimate anger by the public and place blame on the perpetrator of violence, rather than the system itself. However, this approach to accountability does nothing to address the substantive root causes behind why the violence occurred. The criminal legal system has engrained in Americans that criminal punishment is the only legitimate way to express disapproval of violence. The focus on prosecuting Guyger as an expression of accountability is understandable. In the death of Botham Jean, accountability has meant the prosecution of Guyger.
The question we are left with is what does accountability looks like. The movement’s influence has provided hope that finally, there will be accountability for a system that consistently violates the rights of people of color and the poor. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn wide public attention to the problem, and to the institutionalized racism present in law enforcement and prosecutors’ offices. As the shootings have gained more attention, particularly since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, activists have called for accountability. 992 people were killed by police in 2018.
This year alone, 660 people have been shot and killed by police. The epidemic of police violence is undeniable. In a rare instance, a Dallas jury made clear it wouldn’t accept this excuse.
This fear of black male bodies has been used as justification for their killings again and again. Such was the case in the killings of Jean, Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Laquan McDonald, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Stephon Clark, and countless others. The story fit a familiar pattern: a police officer claiming they were “scared” and using that as an excuse to shoot an unarmed black man who posed no immediate threat-and, in most instances, no threat at all. Jean was unarmed, and rather than leave or attempt to diffuse the situation, her first reaction was to shoot. It is plausible that Guyger walked into the wrong apartment by accident, but her subsequent actions were inexcusable. At trial, Guyger testified that she was returning from a long shift, accidentally went to the wrong floor of the apartment complex, walked in, and fired within seconds upon seeing a “silhouetted person” approach her at a “fast-paced” walk. The shooting rightfully provoked outrage, as it is among the most heinous instances of police killing unarmed black men across the country. Guyger lived in the same apartment complex as Jean, and after she walked into Jean’s apartment and shot him, unprovoked, she claimed she thought she was entering her own apartment and he had broken in. Former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger was convicted of murder on Tuesday and sentenced to 10 years in prison, just over a year after shooting and killing a 26-year-old black man named Botham Jean sitting in his apartment.
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