Yet Another Judicial Murder

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My response to the prosecutor who claims opponents to this act are motivated by opposition to the death penalty is "Yeah, so what?". Presumably the former head of the FBI is one of those anti-death penalty haters.

His claim doesn't change the FACTS that prosecution witnesses recanted, there was little physical evidence, no weapon and no DNA evidence. Heck there is plenty here to wonder why he was even convicted, let alone executed.

People have indeed looked at the record, despite his claim, and they find it woefully unconvincing. He may console himself that he won in court, but what he calls losing the PR battle is really code for being unable to convince your fellow Americans that you are right.

Death penalty advocates say there should always be scope for the State to kill the worst of the worst. They usually claim that the system can be operated in such a way to make sure it is only applied to people who are certainly guilty. The Davis case is proof of what fanciful nonsense that is.

Clemency and pardons exist to right such wrongs, and it's a scandal that politicians take pride in never using these remedies. Still, in a nation that includes people who will applaud a guy for executing 234 people without the slightest second thought, including at least some almost certainly innocent, this isn't going to change soon.

As in so many other areas, I doubt the USA is capable of changing itself, even when it is wallowing in the gutter with the likes of China and Iran as company. Only 33% of Americans actually support the death penalty, but somehow its politicians can't bring themselves to side with the 67%. You have to wonder why that is.



Death row controversy built on lie, says lawyer
Simon Mann
September 22, 2011

MANY of the hundreds of thousands of people calling for clemency for a death row inmate in Jackson, Georgia, were doing so because of their opposition to the death penalty, not because of any new evidence that exonerated police killer Troy Davis, according to the prosecutor who led the case 20 years ago.

The supporters of clemency for Davis, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 9.30am today Melbourne time (Wednesday evening Georgia time) after a parole board yesterday rejected a last-ditch plea, include the Pope, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter and a former FBI director, William Sessions.

''Their credibility is hanging on a falsehood,'' said the former prosecutor, Spencer Lawton, breaking his decades-long silence.

''They would know differently if they looked at the record.''

It was the fourth time that an execution date had been set for the 42-year-old Davis, who was convicted of the fatal shooting in 1989 of an off-duty police officer in the car park of a Savannah takeaway.

The family of slain policeman Mark MacPhail welcomed the decision, but were cautious. ''I'm hoping that this is the end for our family,'' said his widow Joan. ''We want to believe so desperately that this is it.''

Earlier, his mother, Anneliese MacPhail, had said: ''I will never have closure because that can't be. But I may have some peace, which I hope for.''

MacPhail, a 27-year-old father of two infants, had sought to break up an argument when he was shot in the chest and face. Davis's arrest and subsequent conviction - despite the absence of a weapon, DNA evidence and any surveillance footage - signalled the beginning of his tortuous trek through the US judicial system, during which time his case was subjected to a series of appeals and at one stage reached the Supreme Court.

Three times he was granted stays, twice just hours before he was due to be executed, as his case became clouded by unreliable witness testimony and the murky issue of race in a Deep South legal system.

Seven of the original witnesses have recanted part or all of their testimony, while at least one juror told the local parole board that she no longer felt comfortable with the verdict.

Two witnesses who testified that Davis had confessed said later they had lied. His defence team had also questioned the racial make-up of the jury and the thoroughness of Davis's earlier legal representation. They also pointed to another man who had been with Davis that evening.

In their 60-page plea to the parole board, they wrote: ''What we now know casts considerable doubt on Mr Davis's guilt and implicates the state's star witness, Sylvester 'Redd' Coles, as the actual murderer.''

The parole board said on Tuesday: ''The board has considered the totality of the information presented in this case and thoroughly deliberated on it, after which the decision was to deny clemency.''

Davis's advocates, including Amnesty International and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, had presented the signatures of more than 660,000 people worldwide, including from Australia, who were appealing for clemency. Davis, who has always maintained his innocence, asked his supporters to continue the fight to clear his name.



Read more: www.theage.com.au/world/death-row-controversy-built-on-lie-says-lawyer-20110921-1kl4s.html#ixzz1YfhRxiVg

[patchoulli]

"Only 33% of Americans actually support the death penalty, but somehow its politicians can't bring themselves to side with the 67%. You have to wonder why that is."



Well that's the question of the century isn't it.

I don't have a clue what the answer is. Money isn't made by putting people to death so ?

[MacBeth]

Our Sick Passion for Execution

An international outcry and some belated media attention couldn’t stop Troy Davis from being put to death. But instead of the ongoing state crime of capital punishment, we’re obsessively debating his innocence—or better yet, the "X Factor" premiere


“A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all heaven in a rage,” wrote William Blake. As the Supreme Court delayed the execution of Troy Davis, Blake’s angry sentiment made you want to hang your head in shame. Here was a possibly innocent man not only imprisoned in a cage, but about to be killed by the state.

The idea that even a shred of doubt exists about whether Davis committed the 1989 crime of which he was convicted—shooting to death an off-duty policeman in Savannah, Ga.—should make a society either grind to a halt or erupt. Davis’s conviction has a thick cloud of doubt hanging over it. But as the executioners in Georgia waited for the Supreme Court’s decision about whether to proceed, you felt the public conversation impatiently drumming its fingers. In the end, the court declined to block the execution, and Davis was killed at 11:08 p.m. Now the question of America’s sick passion for capital punishment will slide away like a baseball score.

When I heard that Davis’s case was in the hands of the Supreme Court, I thought that finally the executioner’s hand would be permanently stayed and justice would be done. After all, three of the Supreme Court justices are devout Catholics. As such, they are certainly familiar with the Catholic concept of “seamlessness.”

According to that doctrine, a moral stance that places human life above any other consideration has to be consistent with other situations in which human life is at issue. If you are pro-life, you must also be against assisted suicide, against war in most cases, and absolutely against the death penalty. For the sake of moral consistency.

True, the notion of “seamlessness” is the product of liberal Catholic theology and the three devoutly Catholic justices—Roberts, Scalia, and Alito—are hardly liberals, either judicially or theologically. But I thought the idea has the type of sophisticated Jesuitical elegance that might appeal to men who pride themselves on their intellectual capacity. Why shouldn’t their pro-life fervor also embrace a disgust for the practice of mere mortals—grossly flawed and imperfect, morally deformed by original sin—deciding whether to take another mortal’s life in cold blood?

The Supreme Court chose not to take the side of life in Troy Davis’s case. And Davis’s supporters, in not seizing on the doctrine of seamlessness themselves, missed a dramatic opportunity to make an issue not just of Davis’s innocence, but also of the ongoing state crime of capital punishment.

As it happened, on the same evening Davis was to be executed, another execution took place over which there was no controversy at all. Lawrence Brewer was executed for the horrendous crime of dragging a black man named James Byrd Jr. to death behind a pickup truck in 1998. His two accomplices also were convicted, with one serving a life term in prison and the other’s death sentence under appeal. But there was no outcry over Brewer’s state-mandated death. No demonstrators protested outside the White House or in front of the prison where Brewer was kept, or outside American embassies throughout much of the world. On the contrary, at least one of Davis’s black supporters wrote that the lesson to be drawn from both cases was that Brewer deserved to die while Davis did not.

If anyone deserved indifference, it was the white-supremacist Lawrence Brewer. His guilt was proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and he was unrepentant to the last, reportedly saying that he would kill Byrd in the same way if he could do it over again. That was all the more reason to seize on the opportunity of the teeming, well-organized outcry against Troy Davis’s execution. The seamless opposition to the state-sponsored murder of both men would have been morally irrefutable.

The only place where seamlessness seems to be alive and well is in our increasingly relativized pubic environment. Davis’s scheduled execution received more and more attention as its hour approached, but nothing like some previous causes célèbres over the past few months. If Davis’s impending execution had, in the same time period, received half the attention lavished on Anthony Weiner, the earthquake that barely was, the hurricane that wasn’t, and a dozen other subsidiary collective obsessions—e.g., Charlie Sheen’s world-historical roast—the question of capital punishment itself might be at the center of debate, and not only the question of Troy Davis’s innocence.

You would think that the possibility of an innocent man murdered by the state would be worth at least one 24-hour news cycle. You would think it would be enough for consequential public figures to stop and ask why America, almost alone among industrialized countries—along with Iraq, Iran, and China—allows capital punishment; why capital punishment, legal only since 1976, is so hard to repeal; why the exposure of one instance after another of innocent people sentenced to death is not enough to repeal it. Surely the Tea Partiers might be persuaded to consider the seamlessness of opposing the federal government tooth and nail, and fighting against government’s prerogative to put men and women to death. The moment seems ripe for an all-out attack on the death penalty.

But … the Emmys have barely ended, the next installment of “Obama vs. the GOP” is hitting the airwaves, DWTS calls! And isn’t that a tropical storm out there, a thousand miles away? It seems that we will not know how to treat our transgressors humanely until we unlock our addled consciousness. Blake, who referred to “mind-forged manacles,” would have understood.


www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/22/troy-davis-executed-our-sick-passion-for-capital-punishment.html

[Pax]

Since there was doubt, they should have reduced to a life sentence.

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I agree with the point made in the article that Beth posted. It's amazing how people who publicly position themselves as pro-life have no trouble simultaneously supporting the death penalty and having American troops kill Muslims for no good reason.

I'm also amused that Tea Party types like Rick Perry claim to be anti-Government expenditure and waste, except when it comes to having the Government paying for killing people, with a process that is proven to cost more than imprisonment.

[patchoulli]

"It's amazing how people who publicly position themselves as pro-life have no trouble simultaneously supporting the death penalty . . "

I've struggled with this because I am the opposite - I am pro-choice but am totally against the death penalty. IMO if there is the slightest doubt that any innocent person could be put to death, then the death penalty cannot be used for anyone at any time. That is crystal clear to me and I cannot fathom why anyone else would not understand it.
At the same time there are those who cannot fathom why I am okay with "killing babies" but not murderers.
War and/or killiing people for no reason is stupid. Period.