Death Is the Only Justice

This week, U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland’s office announced that the U.S. will seek the death penalty for the mass murderer who massacred 10 people on May 14th, 2022, inside Tops Market on Jefferson Avenue. That means there will be a trial that could last for months. It’s a positive step towards a moral justice for our community, but it’s no guarantee it will happen.

I advocated for that human abomination’s death penalty from the first night he was taken to the Holding Center, where he should have been dragged from his cell by a mob of concerned citizens, stoned, and hung by his neck from a light pole in McKinley Square, and allowed a crowd to cheer, point, and laugh while taking selfies of his castrated corpse and sent out as postcards, which was all the rage back in the Jim Crow south. But that’s just me.

I have previously written about my evolution on the death penalty. I was anti-death penalty most of my life. But the older and wiser I became, I realized that there is evil in this world that must be dealt with, with evil. A eye for an eye and a life for a life. I now see the death penalty as a needed option with parameters and safeguards where the accused is absolutely and without any doubt guilty of multiple murders As is with the Tops madman, who plotted to slaughter specifically Black people with a high powered automatic weapon with the word “Nigger” written on the barrow of this rifle, all while live streaming the entire tragedy for the world to watch. If that doesn’t qualify for the death penalty of then nothing does. This was the quintessential hate crime, and the only justice is a public execution in the most cruel and unusual manner imaginable. But that’s just me.

Even if that piece of crap is given the death penalty, it will be years before someone actually flips his switch, which I think is a waste of taxpayers’ money and air, as well as a burden on the surviving families, who must relive their nightmare with every appeal by that human animal. He should be executed in a timely manner like they did back in the day.

Most do not know Buffalo’s history on the death penalty. Buffalo was the site of the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley at the1900 Pan American Exhibitions Music Hall exhibit (near Delaware Park, today). McKinley was stalked and assassinated by an anarchist – a man named Leon F. Czolgosz.

An interesting Black history fun fact is Czolgosz was apprehended at the scene by a bystander named James Benjamin Parker, a Black man, who wrestled the assassin’s gun away from him and broke his nose (then he was erased from the American history books). The assassin, Leon F. Czolgosz, was arrested, tried, convicted, and hung by his neck 45 days after the assassination. That’s justice!