The embrace of the convicted and discredited dead ex-Virginia prison guard Jerry Givens who spent 4 years in prison for a slew of crimes including money laundering by certain anti-death penalty advocacy and abolitionist elements because of his revelation that he was a participant in Virginia's Death Penalty murder scheme and his subsequent idealistic criticism of it reveals and exposes a critical flaw in the prison and criminal justice reform movement and advocacy.
Just because Jerry Givens expressed criticism of his former function as a professional state executioner in Virginia's death penalty murder scheme absolves him of nothing. Because his criminality of murdering human beings was not his singular crime to be accountable for but is the collective responsibility of the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia in whose name Jerry Givens murdered people. So when opponents of Virginia's death penalty murder scheme memorialize Jerry Givens as a progressively-critical voice in the criminal justice reform movement, it ignores and glosses over the fact that Jerry Givens as a prison guard was not simply one who idealistically repudiated the death penalty. But one who embodied all that is wrong with the prison official. Jerry Givens as a prison guard in the 1980's at the Virginia State Penitentiary was a crooked corrupt and malfeasant guard who framed prisoners with phony, fake and contrived charges. He assaulted prisoners who were handcuffed and shackled. He was the typical prison official taking extra-judicial liberties, unaccountable.
It is understandable that anti-death penalty advocates would embrace Jerry Givens and his idealistic repudiation of the death penalty and opportunistically rehabilitate him despite the fact he was a self-confessed murderer of 67 human beings. Because it relatively envelopes opposition to the death penalty with the argument of the confessed ala Saul of the New Testament into eponymous Paul.
But the flaw of this line of thinking by anti-death penalty opposition to the death penalty as it exists in American politics, particularly the political-economics of the former Confederate states and their neo-formulated revisionist narrative, has nothing to do with biblical redemption and confessions and anticipating social-sympathies upon such is a fool's errand,
What anti-death penalty advocacy needs is a robust polemic and the Jerry Givens of history as all petty tyrannical state functionaries who later come to their senses on a speculated conversion cannot be messenger and medium for its practices. Not when proponents of the death penalty and the extra-judicial designs of prison are pushing their reactionary politics and the concurrent hypocrisies of justice as a deliberate and specific type of social control.
By William Thorpe
William Thorpe is held in Solitary Confinement at the Eastham Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice
