A tale of two deaths: necropolitics in the criminal justice system

This is a story of two deaths that occurred in two different locations, 15,000 km apart; one in Australia, and one in the United States. What these deaths have in common is the context in which they occurred. Both were men in their 30s, both were black, and both deaths occurred as a result of the criminal justice system’s colonial necropolitics, in which lives are subjected to the power of death through technologies of control, like the police. Mulrunji Doomadgee, an Indigenous Australian man, died in police custody on the 19th November 2004 and Rudy Eugene, a Haitian-American man, died as a result of police inflicted gunshot wounds on 26th May 2012. The fetishistic disavowal of the police violence that contributed to their deaths demonstrates the precarity of Indigenous and minority lives in these countries.