Troy Davis: Will he suffer the ultimate mistake, execution?

Several executions have made news recently. One was in Texas, current death-penalty capital of the nation, and it made news twice--once when Gov. Rick Perry refused to grant clemency...and again when that governor famously told the world he never lost sleep over a decision about whether a person should live or die. He seems to be unfamiliar with the habits of thought that would best serve a politician's constituency: careful consideration, an in-depth weighing of all ramifications of a course of action, ethical considerations, the health of society, and lots more. He is more familiar with an itchy trigger finger, it would appear, than a troubled conscience.

The other one, still making news in mid-September, 2011, concerns a Georgia man, Troy Davis, who was tried and found guilty on little but hearsay. Calling the evidence in that trial circumstantial would be understatement of mythic proportions.

But then, nuance never enters the minds of those who are so certain that they scarcely understand the term judicious reconsideration.There are a lot of things, too, with which other people in favor of the death penalty seem to be, like Gov. Rick "Roast' em" Perry, unfamiliar.

When certainty underpins thoughtless cruelty

One of these is doubt: they are all virtually certain that the death penalty is right for a number of specious reasons, including:

• The costs of incarceration (the cost of executing someone, what will appeals, etc., is actually higher than 50 years in the slammer at public expense)
• It is thought to deter other criminals from committing a similar crime (it doesn’t)
• It gives the families of the victims closure (no, that would have happened when they buried or cremated the decedent)
• A jury heard the evidence and made a decision, and twelve people could not all be wrong
• Society must exact the ultimate punishment for serious crimes
• It’s God’s will because man is the smartest creature
• Yadayadayada

They are also unfamiliar clemency. Those who favor the death penalty assume that humans can tote up the bad marks in any situation and arrive at the appropriate punishment so that clemency never enters into their equation. It wouldn’t occur to them to practice clemency just in case human evaluation of events is often wildly imperfect.

The limitations of science

Another of the things they doubt is that science has its limitations. Remember the story recently of the “bite mark expert” who literally made up his conclusions about bite marks used as forensic evidence in capital cases? In this case, the science itself didn’t lie; the scientist did. But those who favor the death penalty are willing to believe a scientist without question because “science doesn’t lie” so―in their inadequate, not to say skewed, logic―neither would a scientist. Innocent people went to their deaths on that bite mark “evidence.”

The believers in the death penalty doubt that witnesses lie. And yet, not only do they lie, they lie in response to police intimidation, which itself is a lie. Any police department that intimidates witnesses is lying, wearing the badge of protectors of society, when actually being its bully boys.

"I am not proud for lying at Troy’s trial, but the police had me so messed up that I felt that’s all I could do or else I would go to jail," one key eyewitness in the Troy Davis capital case told Davis’ attorneys, according to Huffington Post.

There is, thankfully, a major thrust afoot to have the Georgia Prisons and Parole Board grant clemency to Troy Davis, scheduled to be executed next week.

Coaching the accusers

It has been known for some time that several eyewitnesses used by prosecutors to identify Davis as the killer had seen a photo of Davis, identifying him as a suspect, before being shown a photo array minus commentary. Bad business, that. Bad police and prosecutor business. In any decent world, a mistrial would have been declared.

But not in Georgia. Not in a population of people that has no doubt of its god-given right to kill people by fiat. Not in a population that never lets doubt sway its conduct, especially when the conduct is aggressive and deadly.

Witnesses also changed their testimony. One told police he had not seen the face of the man who did the shooting. Two years later, he told the jury “he was confident Davis was the killer.” Perhaps the witness is psychic. Or psychotic. Or intimidated. Or suborned. Or moronic. Or vengeful.

The one thing that witness is not is truthful. He cannot be truthful; one of his claims, at least, must necessarily be false.

Circumstantial evidence ad absurdum

There was no physical evidence in the Troy Davis case. None at all. It seems ludicrous to bring a capital charge with nothing concrete to link the accused to the crime. Life in prison, OK. One can, with help, still prove one’s innocence as long as one is alive to do so. If one is dead, not so much.

The Supreme Court of the United States, last March, refused to hear arguments concerning the Troy Davis case. Surprising it is not. It is the Roberts court, a court that errs on the side of hearing cases in which money―big money―is involved, not the relatively petty money changing hands when indigent defendants are represented by public defenders, or even pro bono by costly counsel. They would rather declare an inanimate and largely imaginary entity―a corporation―to be a ‘person’ for the purposes of political donation than declare a death-row inmate eligible for a new trial, one in which actual evidence of guilt―and not hearsay and coerced testimony―are presented.

Bob Barr, a four-term Republican congressman from Georgia, is urging clemency. A supporter of the death penalty, he nonetheless noted in an editorial in the Savannah Morning News that “imposing an irreversible sentence of death on the skimpiest of evidence will not serve the interest of justice.”

Joan of Arc on campus and in the newsroom

I wish I had confidence that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles will grant clemency after the enormous hue and cry over this case. But I don’t. I lived in Georgia for several years. I went to grad school in Athens. And even there, in what passes as a hotbed of liberal thinking in an intellectually impoverished (and proud of it!) state, it was hard to find someone who exercised humanitarian values. Example: When I voiced concern to a campus official about a local corporation was abusing its workers―which I had found out in the course of my part-time job at a local newspaper―and it was upsetting me, I didn’t get any sort of a response except this one: “Oh, you just have a Joan of Arc complex.”

He was telling me I was about to be burned at the stake for being the champion of a workforce treated as badly as the slaves owned by the most vicious slaveholder of olden days. You know what? He was right. It was unhealthy in the extreme, in the 1970s, to express any compassion for the underclasses in Athens, Georgia, and what one got for it was hate mail and a sort of “praying for your godless soul” mail that might as well be hate mail.

The "holier than thou" attitude is hard to fathom, considering that Georgia started out as a penal colony. It’s hard to fathom, except when one realizes that another concept with which Georgians seem to be unfamiliar is the luck of the draw. Troy Davis, it seems, might simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong color of skin. But so far, those in Georgia’s power structure have no paused to consider an age-old truth that can, no matter how much they’d like to think otherwise, apply to ALL people―black, white or other. It is the very familiar line to most of us, the line we often murmur when we see something awful and are thankful we weren’t, by chance, involved: There but for fortune…

Good luck, Troy Davis, and all those working on your behalf.