Executing a Racial Agenda

Never one to miss an opportunity to interject divisive race talk into a discussion, on May 2, 2014 during a press conference with Angela Merkel, Barack Obama commented on the so-called “botched” execution of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett saying

… in the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems — racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence. And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied. And this situation in Oklahoma I think just highlights some of the significant problems there.

So I’ll be discussing with Eric Holder and others, you know — you know, to get me an analysis of what steps have been taken, not just in this particular instance, but more broadly in this area. I think we do have to, as a society, ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions around these issues.

Since Obama made “racial bias” his keystone issue, let’s think about the role of race concerning Clayton Lockett’s crime.  Race was a factor in that Lockett was black and Stephanie Neiman, his murdered victim, was white but, of course, black on white violence never qualifies as a race crime, at least not to Barack Obamas of the world.  We also can consider the “brutality” of the botched execution.  According to eye witnesses, Lockett’s foot kicked, his body bucked, his head rolled side-to-side, and his teeth clenched.  He died of an apparent heart attack [the single most common cause of death in the United States] after one of his veins “blew.”

As is always true with executions, there were witnesses present, 12 including one of Lockett’s lawyers.  Does this sound like the kind of situation wherein someone deliberately would  try to torture the convicted murderer?      

What about Clayton Lockett’s murder victim, Stephanie Neiman? According to Mike Hashimoto of dallasnews.com,

On June 3, 1999, Stephanie was driving a friend home in her Chevy pickup and had the misfortune of arriving when three men were there, supposedly attempting to beat a debt out of Bobby Bornt, 23, who lived there with his 9-month-old son.

One man hit Stephanie’s friend with a shotgun and forced her to call Stephanie inside. The men then raped the friend and beat Stephanie, when she refused to give up her truck keys. They bound her with duct tape and drove her to a country road.

Still, she refused to say she wouldn’t call the police on them, so they forced her to her knees and made her watch one gunman dig a grave. When one man shot her, his gun jammed, while Stephanie screamed. The man cleared his weapon and shot her again.

Even though she was still breathing, the man ordered his accomplices to bury her, which they did.

It’s not clear whether it took 43 minutes more for her to die, and we can’t ask her now if she suffered.

Was it torture to bury someone alive?  Is that worse that waterboarding a terrorist?

Barack Obama can excuse his administration for “botching” the security of the Libyan embassy that resulted in the deaths of four Americans.  He also can excuse the fact that his people failed to launch a rescue attempt.  No one was culpable in Benghazi since race was not an issue.  No one lost his/her job.  Victoria Nuland, State Department spokesperson during Benghazi, actually was promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and is credited with having a February 2014 diplomatic phone conversation at which time she said, “Fuck the EU.”

If Clayton Lockett had been white, Obama would not have had his keystone racial issue to motivate his desire for an investigation.  He would not have said a single word about the execution.  In fact, Barack even admitted during the aforementioned press conference that in some crimes the “death penalty may be appropriate.”  So this is not really about the death penalty, it simply is about race and political partisanship. 

You see the President in particular and the Democrats in general are panicking about the upcoming general election.  They are apoplectic about possibly losing the Senate.  Take a close look at their rhetoric and you will see that they are trying to “energize their voting base” and nothing does that as well as race talk, no matter how damaging it is to the welfare of America as a whole.