Do any lives matter?

We as citizens and family members extend our sincerest condolences to the loved ones of Ann Harrison and all individuals who have been murdered. We, as a caring society, must devote significant resources for nonviolent measures to eliminate suffering and promote healing (including counseling) for those grieving such horrible losses.

On a morning in March 1989 in Kansas City, Nunley was traveling in a stolen car with Michael Taylor after the two had been binging for four days on crack cocaine. Taylor directed Nunley to pull the car over so he could steal a purse from Harrison, just 15 years old, as she waited for a school bus near her home. Instead of a robbery, Taylor abducted her. They drove to the house of Nunley’s mother, where Taylor raped her — DNA evidence verified Nunley’s claim that he refused to do so. They placed the victim in the car trunk, where Taylor repeatedly and fatally stabbed her. Nunley drove the car several blocks away and abandoned it. A few days later, police found the vehicle and captured the two men. Soon after, Nunley confessed to his role in the awful crimes and has consistently expressed genuine remorse.

Nunley was ready to accept life in prison without the possibility of parole, waived his right to a jury trial and pleaded guilty as advised by his counsel, who wrongly believed the judge would sentence him to life. Instead he got a death sentence, as did Taylor, who was executed in February.

In its landmark 2002 Ring decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a jury, rather than a judge, must determine whether factors justify a death sentence. Dozens of people in U.S. prisons, including in Missouri, were consequently resentenced. Nunley and Taylor are among the few who remained under death sentences in such judge-sentenced cases. Had a jury of peers heard evidence of Nunley’s lesser role, his history of head traumas — exacerbating the effects of this rare drug use by him — and his remorse, he might well have received a life sentence.

All humans are precious, but this case reinforces the stark reality in terms of justice, not only in Missouri but nationwide: Black lives tend to matter less than those of their Caucasian counterparts as evidenced by the level of consequences levied against individuals for the crimes they commit, a level that is largely dependent on the race and gender of the victim and the perpetrator. According to a recent study by University of North Carolina researchers on Missouri’s death penalty, people convicted of killing white women were nearly 14 times more likely to be executed than those who had killed black men. The study found that although black men constitute 52 percent of all homicide victims, just 12 percent of individuals who were executed in Missouri were convicted of killing black men.

Since the death penalty was reinstituted in Missouri in 1977, well over 60 percent of the 15,000-plus murder victims in Missouri were black. Yet more than 76 percent — 66 of the 86 men — including Nunley, if he is indeed executed, were convicted of murdering Caucasians. Blacks make up about 40 percent of those executed in throughout the country but constitute less than 15 percent of the population.

Without a doubt, Nunley’s actions were reprehensible and indefensible, but his sentence of death is not in proportion to his criminal culpability. Please contact Gov. Jay Nixon’s office by phoning 573-751-3222 and urge him to stay Nunley’s execution and commute his death sentence.

Join other concerned citizens attending “Vigils for Life,” sponsored by Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, to remember all murder victims and to oppose murder by the state. They will take place from noon to 1 p.m. Tuesday in Jefferson City, outside the governor’s office, Room 216 in the state Capitol — with car-pooling from Columbia at 11:10 in the Clovers Market parking lot at East Broadway and Old 63 — and from 5 to 6 p.m. outside the Boone County Courthouse at Walnut and Eighth streets in Columbia.

Executing Roderick Nunley will put us in his shoes of complicity that day of his crimes. Like him, we will be aware of a life being taken through a criminal procedure we as taxpayers are responsible for, but for which we refuse to accept responsibility. Let’s stand for equality and justice and not the blind application of a law applied more based on skin color than justice.

Call 573-449-4585 for more information.

Nimrod Chapel Jr. is president of the Jefferson City branch of the NAACP.