The federal government has embraced two ways of taking a life.
The first is the official federal death penalty. Even as this administration lifts the moratorium, the process remains defined by its own slowness: long trials, jury verdicts and exhaustive appeals. It is a system of deliberation. I find it abhorrent, but it at least operates under the light of the law.
The second is death by federal agent. Once limited to bad or poorly trained officers, or even rogue police departments, it is becoming the de facto law of the land. This is justice meted out in a heartbeat for the “crimes” of fleeing or disobeying — crimes now being rebranded as “domestic terrorism.” By labeling disobedience as terrorism, the government is attempting to move the executioner’s hand outside the reach of the Constitution. If a citizen is a “terrorist,” then the officer isn’t just a policeman, he is a combatant. This isn’t a semantic shift, it is a legal shield designed to ensure that, when a federal agent acts as judge, jury and executioner in a split second, they are never held to account in the first.
The death of Renee Good is the latest, most haunting example of this terrorism pretext. In the New York Times footage, we see a mother killed for trying to drive away. The administration’s narrative claims she “weaponized” her vehicle, yet the video shows the officer was safe until he chose to step into the car’s path, and even once she started moving the car, he was moving safely out of its path. Ms. Good was clearly trying to avoid him.
You do not stand in front of a moving vehicle to “defend” yourself, you do it to provoke, maybe subconsciously to create, a justification to shoot. To call Renee Good a “domestic terrorist” for being terrified and confused is a grotesque expansion of the term. It turns a traffic encounter into a battlefield, where protocol replaces the Bill of Rights.
When a split-second impulse replaces a trial, the system isn’t working for justice. It is working for the person with the gun. I used to trust our institutions to provide oversight, albeit imperfect. Now, those same institutions are the ones inventing the labels to justify the killing.
All we can do is speak up.