Price of a life

At noon on the afternoon of Aug. 9, Michael Brown was shot to death in Ferguson, Mo. The event spurred days of rioting and unrest in the Southern city. Media coverage of the turmoil was extensive, but both the actual events that transpired and the manner in which the media was covering the events were shrouded in controversy. The protests and rallies continue both in Ferguson and across the country though the mainstream media has begun to spend less time covering them. This past week, the University held a candlelight vigil for Brown.

Though it’s been close to two months since the shooting, there are still only a handful of irrefutable facts: Brown was an unarmed 18-year-old, and he was shot to death by a police officer. Media outlets speculated further. Some accounts insisted that Brown was complying with the police officer’s demands and that the bullets were entirely unwarranted, and others said that Brown had just robbed a convenience store and that he had engaged in a scuffle with police officers moments before the shooting.

The media was quick to latch onto this particular fact — that Brown might have shoplifted from a 7/11 — as if it were an asterisk underscoring the entire ordeal: Were the bullets unwarranted, or were they justified? The New York Times described Brown soon after as “no angel.” NBC News chose a photo of an unsmiling Brown glaring down into the camera and flashing a supposed gang sign to accompany the article written about the events. The media had made their decision — they would portray those bullets as justified.

The hashtags #ifIwasgunneddown and #iftheygunnedmedown quickly began to trend on Twitter, where young women and men of color presented two images of themselves: one featuring drugs, alcohol and snarling grimaces; the other with a smile and a diploma. The point was to draw attention to the way the media portray young people of color in shootings such as this, as though the impact of their deaths could be lessened in some way by a joint they smoked when they were 17. The hashtag campaigns reinforced the argument that Brown’s race was a strong contributing factor to both the police officer’s instinctive reaction and the media’s immediate angle in covering the story.

The thing is, it shouldn’t even be up for discussion whether Brown’s death was justified. The government's taking a life is distinctly within the parameters of capital punishment, legal in many parts of the United States. However, capital punishment is limited in the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution to aggravated murders committed by mentally competent adults. The process is meticulous and painstaking, involving grand juries and meticulous legal representation to determine whether someone who has taken a life deserves the same fate. It is rare that the answer is yes — fewer than 40 death sentences were carried out last year.

A single police officer should not have the authority to carry out capital punishment — especially on a whim. The fact that there was a heated scuffle and that everything happened within the span of a few minutes doesn’t take away from the fact that Brown’s death sentence was doled out without a fair trial or really any trial at all. Brown left his family that morning without any idea that he would never see them again.

When the media subtly tries to justify the death of Brown by suggesting that he had stolen something from the nearby convenience store minutes before, they are essentially saying that he deserved it. One in every 11 people will shoplift at some point in their lives, according to HG.org, a law and government information site. It’s a petty misdemeanor that often doesn’t even result in jail time, let alone the death sentence. Insisting that Brown was “no angel” isn’t an argument either. Eighteen-year-olds are barely adults. They have lived under their parents’ roofs for most of their lives. They haven’t yet had the chance to see the world and to develop beliefs and convictions of their own. Not having your life completely and entirely figured out after graduating the 12th grade doesn’t make you any less worthy of living.

It’s important that our campus held a vigil for Brown. Though the media’s attention might have turned elsewhere, people still care about what happened and want to prevent something similar from happening again. In the particular case of the vigil, we are remembering the person himself — humanizing him —rather than prioritizing the act, the media ruckus or even the riots.

Reading about Brown’s death on the Internet, where there are so many degrees of separation and such a bias toward the flashy and extreme, can sometimes strip away the humanity of the situation. It becomes colder and more clinical and easier to forget that Brown was a boy who did not deserve to die, even if he did fill his pockets up with stolen merchandise from a 7/11 or say something rude to a police officer. Things like that do not warrant a death sentence. To live in a country were the media could suggest that a killing was justified because the victim was “no angel” is barbaric. Brown didn’t owe it to anyone to be an angel. The agreement was never that he had to be an angel to retain the right to his own life.

Shruthi Deivasigamani is a molecular biology major from Cresskill, N.J. She can be reached at shruthid@princeton.edu.