Troy Davis: Killing A Scapegoat Is Easier Than Finding The Actual Murderer
Despite ample evidence suggesting Troy Davis did not commit the murder for which he sits on Georgia's death row, despite ample witnesses saying police and prosecutors badgered them into implicating Davis, the state of Georgia still plans to execute him tonight.
Prosecutors fabricating evidence to convict innocent people is nothing new in contemporary American justice; last year I protested the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court due to her stance on the matter. And I'll just repeat now what I said then:
Prosecutors fabricating evidence to convict innocent people is nothing new in contemporary American justice; last year I protested the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court due to her stance on the matter. And I'll just repeat now what I said then:
I’d like to offer a modest proposal to cut government costs: let’s abolish the criminal court system altogether, and replace it with a big red-white-and-blue top hat of the sort Uncle Sam wears in patriotic posters. Next time a crime is committed, we’ll collect the names of all minority men in the area (and a few especially unpopular white people), dump their names in the hat and then pick a name or two out at random. Whichever name we pick will thus be dubbed “the guilty party” and locked in prison for however long the crime they never committed warrants.And so can the legislators in Georgia. When a crime is committed it's very very important that somebody be punished for it; whether the punished somebody is actually guilty doesn't matter so much.
Why not? If the American court system is fine with imprisoning innocent people, why force prosecutors to waste time and money creating a frame job first? Let’s just cut out the middlemen and put the innocent directly in jail. And Kagan can file an amicus brief explaining why this is just fine, and Obama can praise her for her integrity, excellence and passion for the law.
posted by Jennifer Abel at 1:01 PM
15 Comments:
Quite right. It's amazing just how much ultra-right Teatard rhetorical sensibilities give away. Their whole shtik involves demanding that the state get tough on this or that, teach so-and-so a lesson, show THEM, etc. And accusing their opponents of being "soft" or "weak" on something else.
It's like a political party for impotent old men with penis envy.
So, yeah. They just want someone's blood. It doesn't matter whether they're innocent or guilty, just so long as they're killed and the old men (not mention the closet cases screaming the loudest about fambly valyas and the homasexshul lifestyle) can reassure themselves that they're virile and have big dicks.
Kevin, what the fuck are you on about with the goddamned tea party shit?
The governor in 1991 was a Democrat, it was the state in 1991 that sought the death penalty.
The entire reason the death penalty was sought was because it was a police officer that was killed. The political party in charge then or now matters not one bit.
Any belief I had that our system's problems lie largely with one party over another pretty much vanished after I voted for Obama and he turned out to be simply Bush/Cheney 2.0.
The GOP/Tea Party comments were mainly an observation about the parts of the base who are most gung-ho for the death penalty -- e.g. the people cheering on Rick Perry's executions. And it's overwhelmingly the parts of the South that are most heavily Republican that have these cultural attitudes in their most extreme form.
Ah, yeah, that makes sense.
Of course the so-called "center-left" has its own problems.
The Tea Party base comes from a very culturally authoritarian background -- "show 'em," "teach 'em a lesson," "get tough," etc. -- and is a lot more prone to brownshirt tactics like terroristic threatening against online speech they disapprove of.
The center-left is more prone to smugness and moral superiority -- people with NPR mugs and a "Democrats Care" sticker on the Volvo.
So the GOP base is the Tea Party???
I'll admit the GOP is fracturing and some of the base is trying to latch onto the Tea Party "name" to save their political lives, but equating good ol' fashioned Southern racism with the Tea Party is ludicrous. History shows Southern racism latches on to whichever way the political party winds blow, but it isn't the "base" of anything but itself.
The Tea Party base comes from...
Keep up that meme Kevin and you'll wind up telling me Bush is a Tea Partier.
The Tea Party base comes from GOPers FED UP with Bush's rampant authoritarianism. The idea that Rick Perry is any different than Bush is laughable. He steals some of Ron Paul's "The Fed Sucks!!!" shtick and we're supposed to believe the guy has ANY history of fiscal conservatism??
(Sorry for cluttering your comments, Jennifer, I'll stop now.)
The Tea Party base comes from GOPers FED UP with Bush's rampant authoritarianism.
I dunno, Russ -- that's what they claim, and I would've joined the movement had they started complaining about fiscal irresponsibility and out-of-control government authority while Bush was still in charge. Yet for some (!) reason, the TP movement didn't really get off the ground until a Democrat sat in the White House. (I know lots of people claim racism is the cause, and that surely motivates some of the TPers, but I think for most of them, the issue is not racism but partisanship: out-of-control government didn't suddenly become a problem because the president is black, but because the president is a Democrat.
Russ: I know that "dissident Republicans fed up with mainstream GOP spending, and focused primarily on small government/fiscal conservative issues" is the Tea Party's preferred brand. I'm also aware of a recent study that traced the identities of actual Tea Party supporters back before the TP's appearance as an organized movement, and found the same people several years ago to be Republicans motivated by particularly hardline views on racial and immigration issues.
I'm aware there is a genuinely small-government strand in the TP -- the Paulistas. But it's a minority strand in a movement dominated by people with much more affinity to Palin and Bachmann -- people who worship the perpetual warfare state and believe in torture. And bear in mind that even Ron Paul has to do a fair amount of pandering on stuff like immigration to keep riding the tiger.
There may be some genuine disaffected small-govt Republicans who were attracted by the Tea Party label, but the label itself was pretty much manufactured by Dick Armey and the Koch brothers.
Since the Tea Party is obviously one of your sacred cows and this thread is indeed cluttered up over an issue incidental to the post, I'll also stop now.
The TEA party group in central Washington state was formed by Ron Paul supporters who refused to vote for McCain or Obama.
The death penalty is not the real problem. All the political BS is a part of the problem in that the politicos are interested in furthering their careers more then finding guilty parties.
But the really central problem is actually world wide in that we all accept 'eye witness' as true and correct. ANY conviction that is 'eye witness' only should automatically be suspect because....
1- go to http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/blog-2/ or to any other site featuring optical and sound illusions and tell me after a few minutes watching that 'your eye witness' is reliable.
2- 'Lie to Me' is the only crime show that did it right. When they asked the hero 'to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth' He answered 'NO'. When asked why he said it is impossible as no one can know ' the whole truth' and all I can do is tell you what I think I saw.
Anyone with a little know-how can set up a 'murder scene' where the witness will see the whole thing and swear he saw the killer and he would be 100% wrong.
The other favorite court scene is when the prosecutor asked the witness 'do you see the killer in this court?' and he answers yes and points to the defendant. This is a flat out lie, as the witness does not know the killer so he cannot 'know' the defendant is the killer all he can do is say "the defendant 'RESEMBLES' the killer seen".
As others have stated and I agree with, when it comes to death penalty there should be a preponderance of evidence, not just a few local yokels saying they saw somethin'.
Anyone who thinks there's a meanigful difference between the Republicrats and the Demopublicans probably also thinks there's a meaningful difference between Tide and Cheer.
Sorry, forgot to get back on topic: I'm generally leary of granting the state the warrant to kill people. Once you can kill somebody for some reason, it's not that long a trip to being able to kill anybody for any reason.
If Troy Davis did not commit the crime of which he is accused, that's what this amounts to. Actually, Vicki Weaver and some dead Branch Davidian children say we're already there.
"...I voted for Obama and he turned out to be simply Bush/Cheney 2.0."
Did you really expect anything else from a mainstream candidate? Seriously?!?!?! Your writing ability tells me you're smarter than that...
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