Thoughts on the imminent death of a blogger

Apparently the first blogger on death row, Vernon Lee Evans, is scheduled for execution in Maryland during the week of February 6.  (Hat tip to Capital Defense Weekly and Abolish the Death Penalty; news stories here and here.)  Evans's blog, Meet Vernon, is posted indirectly (internet access isn't one of the amenities typically provided to death row residents).  A friend receives letters from interested parties and delivers them to him, and then posts his responses on his behalf.  Evans, 56, was convicted of a drug gang-related murder of potential witnesses about 20 years ago (he now says that he is innocent). 

Does it need saying that the fact that Evans happens to have a blog in no way distinghishes him from the 3,382 others on death row in this country?  Or I should say, it does distinguish him, in exactly the same way that each of the unique characteristics of each of the other 3,832 distinguish them as well.  Each is an individual -- a singularity, a paradigm, an example, in precisely Giorgio Agamben's sense -- and as such each is exemplary of all of the rest.  This is why, in groping toward a just resolution of the absolute antinomy of sovereignty and individuality posed by the institution of capital punishment, the United States Supreme Court recognizes the defendant's constitutional right to make his or her individuality the keystone of the sentencing defense.  ("Given that the imposition of death by public authority is so profoundly different from all other penalties, we cannot avoid the conclusion that an individualized decision is essential in capital cases. The need for treating each defendant in a capital case with that degree of respect due the uniqueness of the individual is far more important than in noncapital cases," Lockett v. Ohio (1983).)  That's the best that a court can do, I suppose, under a form of sovereignty that (if Agamben, but also more or less the rest of the Western political-philosophical tradition as well, is correct) is defined by its power of death over its subjects.  By the same token, however, if the singularity of the individual seems like something that instead ought to trump the power of the state absolutely --  beyond simply being one reason for the state, at its whim, to demonstrate mercy by declining to exercise its right to kill -- then one has to begin thinking about, and looking for emergent signs of, forms of sovereignty that don't conform to Agamben's model.  More on this in some other post. 

Update:  More on Evans at Sentencing Law & Policy.