We Are a Society That Punishes Survivors of the Horrors That We Create
Kendrick Simpson: On The Bridge and At the Convention Center
In 2005, Kendrick Simpson stood on a bridge in New Orleans, surrounded by water that was not actually water, but liquified abandonment. The floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina had transformed the city into a vast drowning machine, and the federal government’s response had transformed its Black residents into something expendable. Simpson stood there with thousands of others, no food, no water and no hope of rescue. Just the sun and the bridge…and the growing awareness that his country had decided that he wasn’t worth saving.
When the bridge finally released Kendrick, he made his way to the Convention Center, where thousands of people were warehoused in conditions that defied every promise America had ever made about human dignity. No basic services. No food. No water. Just bodies packed together in a tomb for the living…waiting to see if anyone with power cared enough to acknowledge they even existed.
Simpson survived. That’s what the newspapers will say. That’s what the court records say. That Kendrick Simpson, a New Orleans native, survived Hurricane Katrina.
But survival is the wrong word for what happened on that bridge…in that convention center…in that city. What happened there was a kind of murder that just leaves the body breathing. What happened there was the state demonstrating its’ evil calculation, with crystal clarity, that Black life in America is inconvenient to preserve.
Kendrick Simpson carried all of those experiences with him. Perhaps most devastatingly, he carried the knowledge that his government had left him to die and casually walked away. The trauma manifested as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a clinical diagnosis for what happens to the brain when a human experiences trauma that no human should ever have to experience.
Kendrick Simpson’s Crime: Two Lives Lost
So, when 2006 came and Kendrick Simpson found himself in a paranoid state, believing he and his co-defendants were in danger, and he opened fire on a car, killing two men…we need to sit with the full weight of what happened.
Two human beings died. Two families lost someone they loved. Two lives ended because Kendrick Simpson, in a state of paranoid terror, pulled a trigger. This is not metaphor. This is not symbol. This is blood and permanent loss. Whatever else is true about trauma and systemic violence, it is also true that Kendrick Simpson killed two people.
He knows this. He has said it clearly. He acknowledges his actions. He carries the weight of what he did. His remorse is not performance or legal strategy. It is the knowledge that he took from the world that which cannot be returned.
However, the question is not whether such terrible violence occurred. The question is what it means to execute someone for violence that emerged directly from the violence done to them. The question is whether we can look at the bridge, the convention center, the abandonment and the PTSD and say, “Yes, and he must die for what all of that created.”
What the Jury Never Heard
During Simpson’s 2007 trial, the court would not allow evidence to be presented to the jury about his PTSD as it related to guilt or intent. The jury heard about the shooting. They heard about the deaths. They heard about the two men who would never go home to their families. They did not hear about the bridge. They did not hear about the convention center. They did not hear about what such trauma does to a human mind to be left to die by the very government that now sought to kill him legally.
The crime was never in question. The deaths were never in dispute. But the trauma that broke him was deemed irrelevant to whether he intended to do what he did. His survival of abandonment was excluded from the calculus of culpability. The jury was asked to sentence a man to death without being told who the man actually was.
How the Death Penalty Actually Works
This is how the death penalty actually works in America. We create the conditions for trauma and violence…and then we prosecute people for what emerges from those conditions…most of the time without even letting a jury hear what the person has actually been through.
Completing the Abandonment of Kendrick Simpson
Let’s be honest, what Oklahoma wants to do is complete the abandonment that began on a bridge in New Orleans, not by acknowledging it but by erasing it from consideration, by treating his trauma as legally irrelevant, by executing him as if the bridge never happened. The only difference is that this time, they’ll use poison instead of floodwater. This time, they’ll call it justice instead of disaster response. This time, they’ll say it’s for the two men who died rather than admitting it’s about refusing to reckon with what extreme governmental abandonment does to human beings.
But the mechanism is the same. The refusal is the same. The message is the same.
Black life in America is expendable. Black trauma in America is inadmissible. Black survival in America is something to be punished rather than something that demands our reckoning with what we did to create the conditions for the violence we now prosecute.
A Society That Punishes Survivors Like Kendrick Simpson
We are a society that punishes survivors of the horrors that we create. We drown cities. We abandon populations. We leave people on bridges to die. We pack them into buildings without food or water. We traumatize them beyond the capacity for normal human functioning. And then, when that trauma later manifests as violence, when broken people do broken things, we execute them for being traumatized and broken…and have the audacity to call it justice.
Clemency: The Whole Picture of Kendrick Simpson’s Life
With a February 12 execution date fast approaching, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board will hold a clemency hearing for Kendrick Simpson on January 14. They will be asked to look at the whole picture. If they even see part of the picture, there is no possible way they won’t grant clemency.
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