On Killing
As it stands, the State of Georgia is going to execute a man named Troy Davis a week from this coming Monday.
Davis was convicted of killing a policeman. Since the trial, the great majority of witnesses have recanted their testimony. Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay, considered whether to hear his appeal, and declined to do so without comment.
The part about this impending execution that really gets me is that almost everyone concedes that there is real doubt about his guilt. But the test used here in Georgia creates such a high burden on the defendant that it is virtually impossible to get a new trial. You can read all about it here: Davis v. State (warning, turgid legalese).
There are times that law gets in the way of justice. This is one of them. Davis may well be innocent. If he's innocent, the State is culpable in his death by erecting legalistic roadblocks to determining the truth. I know, at some point we have to have finality; but, when we are going to kill someone, the test should not be beyond a reasonable doubt, it should be certainty. I'm not at all certain.
7 comments:
"the State is culpable in his death by erecting legalistic roadblocks"
What was the source/purpose of these roadblocks? The real pessimistic side of me sometimes assumes that these roadblocks are put in place to expedite executions, lest the lawyers keep it in appeal turnaround forever. Am I right or am I wrong?
(If my question is answered in the course of that link you offered, forgive me, but you had me at "turgid legalese.")
The legalistic roadblocks are the pretty much the same as in any other criminal case. They are designed to give finality to a trial verdict unless there was a serious screw-up or a manifest miscarriage of justice. They've evolved over the last couple of centuries. They aren't evil or biased; but, I think they fail in a circumstance where there is no further chance to "get it right."
The MacPhail family and certain wordmongers seem very certain about the guilt of Mr. Davis. If they have some information that the general public does not have, I wish they would share it.
chamblee54
I love the word turgid.
It's at times like these that I'm glad we don't have the death penalty here.
How does one live with themselves if they make such a grave error?
Exactly my point Michelle, but more economically said.
As I type, there is a coffee table book in my office lobby titled "The Innocence Project." It is five or six years old. It has the pictures and stories of a bunch of people released from death row after DNA testing proved that absolutely certain eye witness testimony was wrong.
We get it wrong sometimes. Until we know we cannot be wrong, I cannot understand how we can institutionally kill people.
This is my main reason for being against the death penalty. At least, if someone is given a death sentence and is somehow later found to be innocent -or wins an appeal that turns the verdict/sentence around, the person is still able to benefit from the correction. If you execute someone and learn later that the person was in fact, innocent, kind of hard to do a reversal then, isn't it?
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