1464: Missing You

[ThePinkSuperhero]

Jesse's unwillingness to see the light on his website calendar cracks me up.

[Junkenstein]

as a resident of a european country, all i heard about troy davies was biased. If one had to follow what the news were reporting here or the commentary of the various libertards, it sounded like Davis was "an innocent man framed by the system because he was black".

which is a lie.

[Junkenstein]

Also, the "taking a break" from a relationship always meant to me that a break up was about to happen. and it did.

never been able to "fix things" or "stay friends". I tried and it got everything awkward and painful.

so to me "Lets take a break" means "its over". And no, i wont stay friends after that.

[CherryLavender]

That was what the liberal media was attempting to convey...

Originally Posted by Junkenstein

as a resident of a european country, all i heard about troy davies was biased. If one had to follow what the news were reporting here or the commentary of the various libertards, it sounded like Davis was "an innocent man framed by the system because he was black".

which is a lie.

[Montucky Jess Jess]

Please, please, PLEASE make Keith 'cover' a goof-ball song on each and every episode.

[Blitzgal]

I honestly don't know if Davis was innocent. That's not the point. The point is that there was doubt, and we have no business allowing the state to kill people if there is one iota of doubt. He should have been commuted to life. We already know for a fact that Texas has executed at least one innocent man. And yet Scalia says that if the first trial ended in a conviction, it's still constitutional to execute the person, EVEN IF there later is doubt about his guilt. That's FUCKED UP.

7 of the 9 witnesses recanted, saying that police coerced them. Cops pulled shit like showing them a picture of Davis, and THEN showing them a photo array. They pressured people who were on probation to finger Davis because they knew they feared going back to prison. Many of the witnesses have since said that they were not even there at the time of the shooting or had never even seen Davis before cops showed them his picture. Of the two witnesses who didn't recant, one is dead and the other is just as likely the shooter as Davis himself.

The conviction was entirely based on witness testimony, as there was no weapon recovered and no physical evidence linking him to the crime. A pair of "bloody shorts" were taken from his home without a warrant and suppressed at the first trial, however during a subsequent trial the shorts were processed using DNA technology and not only could they not link the "blood" to the crime scene, but they could not even determine that the substance WAS blood. If a conviction is based on witness testimony and the majority of witnesses admit that they were lying under police pressure, then we should not put that person to death.

And regarding the race component, consider that in just 2008 the Georgia board of clemency commuted a death row inmate to life in prison. He'd shot and beaten a former employer to death. He'd pleaded guilty and there was zero question about his possible innocence. The other difference between him and Troy Davis? Here you go:



The facts regarding the death penalty are clear. If you are black, you are THREE TIMES more likely to receive the death penalty for committing the same crime as a white person. It has nothing to do with "blacks committing more crimes" because we're talking about people who committed the same crime being treated differently based on their race.

[Cretaceous Bob]

Originally Posted by Blitzgal

The point is that there was doubt, and we have no business allowing the state to kill people if there is one iota of doubt.

This is the thing, though, is that life in prison is just about as much of a miscarriage of justice as the death penalty would be if he was innocent.

Saying that there is so much of a distinction between life in prison and the death penalty is giving your efforts to improve justice far more than is due.

I don't think the death penalty was appropriate for Troy Davis's case, but if he was innocent life in prison wouldn't have been much better, and if he was guilty than we got it right. The difference appears marginal to me.

What should be important here is improving where his case started by working to ensure that our conviction and sentencing process is more accurate, but nobody's out in the street crying about that.

[Blitzgal]

Originally Posted by Cretaceous Bob

What should be important here is improving where his case started by working to ensure that our conviction and sentencing process is more accurate, but nobody's out in the street crying about that.

You're right that the Twitter folks who were talking about the issue aren't on the street "crying" about that, but I reject the notion that "no one" is working to improve the system. One example of this is the decades long push to erase the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine convictions. That finally happened just this year, and it's been an issue for at least three decades. The trouble is that when something is as institutionalized as this disparity (in which poor and minority criminals do not receive the same treatment) the job is enormous and isn't going to go away overnight. It obviously doesn't help when we have people like Scalia on the Supreme Court arguing that it's okay to go ahead and execute someone if his guilt is in doubt, so long as that first trial ended in a conviction.

But when you have cases like the West Memphis Three, Cameron Todd Willingham and the Davis case, average people start to realize that maybe the system is broken. Illinois's criminal justice system was so fucked up they put a moratorium on the death penalty and just this year finally abolished it, citing wrongful convictions as the reasoning. Support for the death penalty has waxed and waned in the US. We're currently at a high point right now. I hope these cases at least get people thinking about the power they're giving over to the state.

I know that my objections imply that I would be "for" the death penalty if it was a perfect system. But there's the rub. A perfect system is flat out impossible. Politics, bureaucracy, and sheer bloodthirsty vengeance means it will never happen. And that's why it needs to stop.

The last thing I want to bring up is one more stat. These are the countries that the United States stands with in state executions. This is the company we keep:

1. China
2. Iran
3. North Korea
4. Yemen
5. United States
6. Saudi Arabia
7. Libya
8. Syria
9. Bangledesh
10. Somalia

[Junkenstein]

There always is and always will be doubt about a sentence. this case was brought up to the papers and used (and honestly, really manipulated) as a poster for the anti-death penalty cause.

focusing on doubt would mean abolishing the capital punsihment and that would be a whole different issue. if we see it as a punsihment, or a possible deterrent for crime (whether it works or not, its a different issue), it shouldnt be different than life-sentence. when the court decides its the case, thats how it went. even if it was unclear.

the tory davis case had more gainst him than in his favour from what i heard. and the way it was put in terms of racial issues was seriously unsettling.

[Blitzgal]

Originally Posted by Junkenstein

the tory davis case had more gainst him than in his favour from what i heard. and the way it was put in terms of racial issues was seriously unsettling.

You heard wrong. I can't make it any simpler. He was convicted on the basis of witness testimony. 7 of 9 of those witnesses recanted and alleged police sheninigans. One of the remaining two is dead. The other (Sylvester Coles) is a likely suspect in the shooting. He confessed this to three people, AND he threatened the life of one of the other witnesses, forcing her and and her family to go into hiding.

And this issue IS very racial:

Race and the Death Penalty | Capital Punishment in Context

Fewer than 40% of Georgia homicide cases involve white victims, but in 87% of the cases in which a death sentence is imposed the victim is white. White-victim cases are roughly eleven times more likely than black-victim cases to result in a sentence of death.

When the race of the defendant is added to the analysis, the following pattern appears: 22% of black defendants who kill white victims are sentenced to death; 8% of white defendants who kill white victims are sentenced to death; 1% of black defendants who kill black victims are sentenced to death; and 3% of white defendants who kill black victims are sentenced to death. (Only 64 of the approximately 2500 homicide cases studied involved killings of blacks by whites, so the 3% figure in this category represents a total of two death sentences over a six-year period. Thus, the reason why a bias against black defendants is not even more apparent is that most black defendants have killed black victims; almost no cases are found of white defendants who have killed black victims; and virtually no defendant convicted of killing a black victim gets the death penalty.)

There is also a lot of indication that these cases are the result of a state being unwilling to admit that an error has been made. In the West Memphis Three case, the state allowed the men to make an Alford plea, which means that although we KNOW that someone else murdered that child, as far as the state's concerned the case is done. So a child murderer (probably the step-father) has been walking the streets for twenty years. And nothing will be done about it.

In the Cameron Todd Willingham case, as it became clear that the fire was not arson, Governor Rick Perry fired the investigators in the case, hampering the investigation. Willingham was executed in 2004, but by 2009 it was clear that he was innocent.

The ensuing cover-ups are even worse than the initial wrongful convictions. Mistakes and fraud can happen, but if the state refuses to even consider they've occurred and worse than that tries to cover them up, that's criminal.