Today, I have a little taste in my mouth. I imagine it’s similar to the taste Northern progressives had in their mouths during the Civil Rights Era, where you can’t quite believe the immorality of what’s going on in the South. Are we part of the same country? And why can’t the Supreme Court do anything? Why doesn’t the president act? How can Congress allow laws like these to stand on the books?
I don’t know if Troy Davis was guilty. I have my doubts. But what I find really appalling is how the law worked in his case. Once he was convicted, his burden shifted from proving a reasonable doubt to proving his innocence. That might make sense for a drug or rape conviction, but it makes no sense in a capital murder case. No fair-minded person could look at the facts of the Troy Davis case and not have some doubt about the quality and veracity of the prosecutor’s argument in court and even some of the police work that was done during the investigation. But that wasn’t the standard the District Court or the Appeals Court or the Supreme Court or the Georgia parole board were using. That’s wrong.
We have to treat a capital case differently. When the moment comes to carry out an execution, we have to go back over all the known facts and make a fresh assessment. We can’t give so much deference to the original trial, especially when twenty years have elapsed and many parts of the prosecution’s case have fallen apart or come into serious question. You cannot execute a person if there is substantial doubt about whether they even committed the crime.
The debate about Troy Davis should have been about whether he had been wrongly imprisoned for two decades, not over whether he could prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt.
How did we arrive at a system where so much discretion is stripped away from the decision makers?
This case highlights every flaw with the death penalty. Even from the point of view of advocates of the death penalty, it took 20 years to get ‘justice.’ Whether we abolish the death penalty or not, this case proves that it is in need of an overhaul. Georgia might have killed an innocent man last night simply because the system didn’t allow people to save him, despite the obvious doubts about his guilt.
ICAM BooMan. you don’t execute someone unless no stone has been unturned. and a case where 78% of your witnesses RECANT – what is that?
then again, I’m from Illinois where a majority of the people on Death Row were found to be INNOCENT – note, I didn’t say ‘not guilty’ – I said INNOCENT, which is why our then Governor put a moratorium on the Death Penalty.
Too bad the killer didn’t leave any DNA or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Finality of judgment is considered a positive in our system of justice, and for the most part it is. But I agree with you that in death penalty cases, there is a greater good, and that ought to be clear to everyone, including the victim’s family if they think about it. After all, where is the justice in executing the wrong person?
For me, though, I’ve long been against the death penalty because of what it does to us as a people to be a nation that executes. It’s hard to see directly, because for those of us who grew up here, we’re pretty well defended against it by the time we’re old enough to really think about it. You can get glimpses of what it does to us, the way it hardens us, in things like the cheers of the GOP debate crowd in reaction to the statement that Rick Perry as governor of Texas has presided over 234 executions, more than any other governor. Or you can see it indirectly when you look at the responses to our death penalty in people from other countries who didn’t grow up with it. It must be like our response to the practice of beheading as a means of execution: We’re horrified.
It’s the attitude of the system that screams to be tossed; would this case have looked like this at any stage if it were tried in Oregon, NY or Calif? And when the attitude makes the decisions instead of the spirit of the law itself this is where we end up.
Rachel read the letter from the former prison wardens and men who had been tasked with the actual final injections and they wrote of how the killing haunts them and will for the rest of their lives. I doubt few consider what we ask of those who must carry out the final act. Davis’ last words were for the souls of the men who injected him, they were words of forgiveness, and it occurs to me that the man who was killed demonstrated a more pure heart than many of those who chose to deny him life.
Well at least it looks like Romney is on the upswing to face Obama.
this is on topic?
Does it need to be?
The DP is not going to be challenged, no matter how heinously it is applied. You’ve seen the polls, even when innocents have been executed people don’t care.
Good post, Booman, but I have to take issue with the undue credit you give to “northern progressives.” One of the great things about attending a Historical Black College like Howard University is that you have access to the untold history of the black experience in America and unsung heroes. I took full advantage of learning the unvarnished truth of the Civil Rights Movement and countless unsung heroes of the movement, black, white and Jewish. In many ways the chance to tell the real history died with Dr. King. The history of the movement has been varnished to make it more palatable to white America, specifically overlooking the racism in Northern cities like Chicago, Boston, Philly, NYC and even here in DC. As Aaron McGruder would say, it’s the McDonald’s Black 365 history we get today. It makes progressives uneasy to hear this, but some of the worst atrocities against African Americans happened in those cities under the blind eye of progressives. When Dr. King and the SLC took the Civil Rights Movement North to Chicago AFTER the passage of the Civil Rights ACT, they received more violent resistance there than in the South while many northern “progressives” did nothing but call them trouble makers. And let’s keep it real, there are STILL many pockets in so-called progressive towns like Boston, Philly and NY that Black folks would be wise not to be in when the sun goes down.
All this leads to a larger point. We don’t just have a problem with “fair” administration of the death penalty or a problem with the criminal justice system in the south; we have a criminal justice problem in the United States as a whole. And let’s not just put this on conservatives. Democrats, including “progressives”, contributed to the exponential rise of black and brown incarceration. Largely because of the actions of Bill Clinton, including his Omnibus crime bill and the advent commercial imprisonment, 1 in 3 black men are now under some sort of criminal justice supervision in this country. While nothing is as egregious as the death penalty, locking 18-year-old black and brown kids for 15 years to life for first-time drug offense isn’t a much better fate. Democrats, progressives, and African Americans alike allowed this to happen.
So northern “progressives” shouldn’t be patting themselves on the backs too much. You have much accountability too.
All true, albeit I would classify progressives of the Civil Rights Era as precisely those who fought for Civil Rights. As opposed to, say, the Philly or Chicago machines. But, yes, depending on how you define progressive, your point is correct.
Part of the problem with bringing ‘progressives’ into a conversation is that the term is so ambiguous.
Have you seen this?
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/the-night-they-killed-troy-davis/245515/
The death penalty is barbaric. Seems like our current system is wired for convictions, not impartiality.
Me, I’d say it’s wired for keeping the balance of power exactly as it is.
Yup. It reduces change/evolution itself, not just instability.
Lots of societies have had the death penalty. It didn’t stop them from passing away like everything else.
? I was talking about the justice system as a whole.
Anything that doesn’t change dies. The trick is to manage change so that you survive without descending into chaos and revolution. As we’ve seen so well the last few years our system in all aspects is perhaps mortally ossified.
That is to say: it changes.
No. It loses its essence once it dies and becomes the sum of its parts, no more.
Well, if we want to get ontological we can: there is no essence.