The case against Troy Davis
Troy Davis has been executed by the state of Georgia after 22 years on death row. Before his death he had become a cause célé¨bre, and—unlike some such cases—it was with good reason.
I had never heard of him before a day or two ago, but a quick reading up on the facts of the crime of which he was accused, and his conviction and appeals, has convinced me that, although the truth will probably never be known, there was more than enough doubt about his guilt to warrant a commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment, and probably a new trial.
You may disagree with what I say; Ann Coulter certainly does, for example, although Bob Barr and William Sessions (former FBI chief under Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton) think that Davis should not have been executed. The holes in the case against Davis are just too large.
To summarize: there were two shootings in the same evening, perhaps by the same perpetrator. The first was at a party [correction: actually, it was on leaving the party in a car], and the victim lived; the second resulted in the murder of a policeman (Mark MacPhail) who had attempted to intervene in an altercation in the parking lot of a Burger King. It was the latter for which Davis received the death penalty from the jury, at a time (1989) in Georgia when there was no option of sentencing him to life without parole.
The evidence at the trial seemed fairly powerful at the time, although subsequent developments have made it less so. The prosecution produced seven witnesses who fingered Davis as the cop-killer, plus two jailhouse-snitch cellmates who said Davis had confessed to them [correction: one was a jailhouse snitch and one a neighbor; both have since recanted and said Davis never confessed to them] (the latter type of witness is notoriously unreliable, with motivation to implicate a person either as a grudge or to gain favor with the justice system, or both; in the Davis case they have both since recanted and said they heard no such confession from him). The other, seemingly strong, witnesses against Davis either had initially shaky elements in their testimony (one of the strongest, for example, initially said he didn’t see him well enough to identify him, and yet somehow was able to do so at the trial, two years later) and/or have subsequently recanted in various ways, mostly through saying they had been coerced and frightened by the police. Many were young teenagers at the time of the shooting.
One of the few witnesses who has not recanted is the man who was with Davis that night at the killing, Sylvester (“Redd”) Coles. Coles implicated Davis as the shooter in MacPhail’s murder almost immediately, but since there was an absence of forensic evidence (the gun was never found), there is no reason to believe that Coles himself was not actually the killer, which is what Davis alleged. So you have a fact situation that is highly unfortunate: the heinous killing of a policeman, undoubtedly committed by one of two people (Coles or Davis); a crime scene lacking enough evidence to convict either without eyewitness testimony; a death penalty verdict (irrevocable and irreversible once carried out); and witnesses who have mostly since recanted.
My sense is that the police were so outraged by the killing that they wanted to make sure they got someone, and the case against Davis was stronger than that against Coles (at least in part because of Coles coming forward so soon to implicate Davis). Several witnesses have said it was Coles who did it, but this was a case in which both possible perpetrators resembled each other in height and weight and race, and where the scene was dark, the situation chaotic, and identification inherently difficult.
One thing that does not seem to be true—even though it has been widely alleged—is that racism played much of a part here. Yes, the victim was white, and Davis was black. But so is Coles, and so were seven of the jurors and most of the witnesses. It just doesn’t seem to have mattered in this particular instance.
Unfortunately for Davis, despite the multiple recantations the governor of Georgia is not allowed to commute death sentences, and the appeals courts set the standard of proof for overturning the jury verdict very high.
Here’s Barr on the subject, and I am in agreement:
But the federal judge set the bar much higher than the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. Finding ”” astonishingly for the first time ”” that executing an innocent man is unconstitutional, the court then required Davis to prove that he was innocent.
Proving one’s innocence is a far more difficult standard than establishing doubts as to one’s guilt. In fact, proving actual innocence has the effect of flipping our system of criminal jurisprudence on its head: Instead of a presumption of innocence and a requirement by the state to prove guilt.
In Davis’ evidentiary hearing the court presumed guilt and required the condemned to prove his innocence. Even the judge deemed the standard “extraordinarily high.” Proving one’s innocence of a crime is a potentially insurmountable task ”” one Davis was unable to meet. But while Davis was unable to “prove” his innocence, he established considerable doubts as to his guilt, prompting the judge to acknowledge that the state’s case against him was “not ironclad.”
…[I]mposing an irreversible sentence of death on the skimpiest of evidence will not serve the interest of justice.
And it has not. Barr is, as he says, a “longtime supporter of the death penalty.” But the death penalty is inappropriate for a fact situation such as Davis’s.
As for Ann Coulter, who has been very much in favor of Davis’s execution, her arguments are misleading. She leaves out some very important facts when she writes:
Among the witnesses who did not recant a word of their testimony against Davis were three members of the Air Force, who saw the shooting from their van in the Burger King drive-in lane. The airman who saw events clearly enough to positively identify Davis as the shooter explained on cross-examination, “You don’t forget someone that stands over and shoots someone.”
Sounds convincing, doesn’t it? And it is, until you read this:
One [witness] who has not recanted his testimony is…Steven Sanders. He was one of a number of members of the US Air Force who were in a van at the drive-in section of the Burger King restaurant at the time of the crime. In a statement given to police shortly after the shooting, Stephen Sanders said that he had seen a “black male wearing a white hat and white shirt, black shorts” shoot the officer and then run off with another person who Sanders thought was wearing a “black outfit”. He said that he “wouldn’t recognize them again except for their clothes”. However, for the first time, two years later, at the trial, Stephen Sanders identified Troy Davis as the gunman…Two of his Air Force colleagues, Daniel Kinsman and Robert Grizzard, who were with Sanders at the time of the crime, have signed affidavits standing by their statements given to the police that they could not identify the gunman. Robert Grizzard has said that, contrary to what he mistakenly testified at the trial, he could not then and still could not recall what the gunman was wearing. For his part, Daniel Kinsman has testified that he remains convinced that the gunman was firing the gun with his left hand. Troy Davis is right-handed.
Doesn’t sound quite as powerful when put that way compared to the way Ann Coulter tells it, does it (including the fact that Sanders disagrees with all the other witnesses about the color of Coles’s clothing that night)?
Coulter manages to write her entire 1000+ word essay without even mentioning Coles and his role as witness, except to say that there were two men at the crime scene, one in a white shirt and one in a yellow shirt. Coulter also writes that “Not one witness said the man in the yellow shirt pistol-whipped the vagrant or shot the cop.” But this is disingenuous of her; after all, why would they? It was Davis who was on trial, not Coles (who had become one of the prosecution’s star witnesses), and it was Davis the police were framing their case against when they interrogated potential witnesses. If police coercion and intimidation were used to shape their testimony, the results certainly wouldn’t have included the idea that it might have been Coles who actually was guilty. And of course we can’t expect Coles to have implicated himself.
Coulter also conveniently omits this sort of thing, which describes some of the testimony at a 2010 hearing where Coles was fingered by some as the guilty party, and why such testimony was excluded:
Anthony Hargrove testified that Redd Coles had admitted the killing to him. The state’s lawyers described Hargrove’s testimony as hearsay evidence; Judge William T. Moore permitted the evidence but stated that unless Coles appeared, he might give the evidence “no weight whatsoever.” Another witness making a similar statement was heard, but a third was rejected by Judge Moore as the claims were inadmissible hearsay because Coles was not called as a witness and given the opportunity for rebuttal. Moore criticized the decision not to call Coles, saying that he was “one of the most critical witnesses to Davis’s defense”. One of Davis’s lawyers stated that the day before they had been unsuccessful in serving a subpoena on Coles; Moore responded that the attempt had been made too late, given that the hearing had been set for months.
I don’t know about you, but I am extremely uncomfortable with executing a man based on this sort of record. I also believe that requiring a person to prove his or her innocence is an unconscionably high standard. That doesn’t mean that Davis wasn’t guilty; I have no idea whether he was or wasn’t. But he does not have to be have been innocent to convince me that his execution was wrong (even if legal), and that it will serve to set back the cause of those who believe in the death penalty, as well as the cause of justice.
[ADDENDUM: And here John Hawkins rails against bleeding-heart liberals who love cop-killers such as Davis. Of course, it serves Hawkins’s purpose to ignore the fact that a lot of people who argued that Davis should not be put to death are not liberals and do not oppose the death penalty. What’s more, Hawkins disingenuously repeats Coulter’s sophistic argument about the number of witnesses in the Davis trial [emphasis mine]:
Of course, despite the incredibly slanted accounts you may have read, Troy Davis is not one of these mistakes. More than a dozen courts looked at the trial and came to that conclusion — and no wonder. Davis shot a cop to death in public. There were 34 witnesses at the trial. Some of them were strangers. Some of them were friends of Davis. To this day, there are several people, some strangers and some former friends, who said they saw Davis shoot Officer Mark MacPhail and haven’t recanted.
Talk about “incredibly slanted!” The appeals courts did not rule on Davis’s guilt or innocence in the same way the trial had. They required that Davis prove his innocence, an almost impossibly high standard, especially because of lack of forensic evidence. Then there’s the statement about “34 witnesses.” Does Hawkins not imply here that there were 34 eyewitnesses who identified Davis at trial? There were not (the research I’ve done has indicated that 34 is the number of witnesses of all sorts whom the prosecution called at the trial), and almost all the eyewitnesses who fingered Davis have recanted. Plus, the main “friend of Davis” who fingered Davis was possible-murderer Coles, whom Hawkins, like Coulter, does not mention was a witness. And I’ve already described some of the flaws in the testimony of those few other witnesses like Sanders, who have not recanted.)
If Hawkins and Coulter and others think Davis is guilty and that his execution was just, fine. But don’t distort the record or omit obvious and important facts in order to make your argument, which is what I have seen from every article I’ve read so far from the pro-Davis-execution camp. I don’t like this sort of sophistry when it’s done on the left, and I don’t like it any better when it’s done on the right. Mistakes are one thing, but this looks like purposeful shaping of the record to make a polemic argument.]
[ADDENDUM II: Ace weighs in on the matter of the shirts.]
[ADDENDUM III] Several commenters have put forth the idea that Davis was guilty because blood was found on the shorts he wore that night; some bloggers have alleged it was Officer MacPhail’s blood. Since this is one of those lies that get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on, I thought I’d set the record straight by quoting Judge Moore, a district judge who ruled on Davis’s case in 2010:
The State introduced evidence regarding Mr. Davis’s “bloody” shorts. (See Resp. Ex. 67.) However, even the State conceded that this evidence lacked any probative value of guilt, submitting it only to show what the Board of Pardons and Parole had before it. (Evidentiary Hearing Transcript at 468-69.) Indeed, there was insufficient DNA to determine who the blood belonged to, so the shorts in no way linked Mr. Davis to the murder of Officer MacPhail. The blood could have belonged to Mr. Davis, Mr. Larry Young, Officer MacPhail, or even have gotten onto the shorts entirely apart from the events of that night. Moreover, it is not even clear that the substance was blood. (See Pet. Ex. 46.)]
“……..although the truth will probably never be known, there was more than enough doubt about his guilt to warrant a commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment, and probably a new trial.”
Could not agree more. I understand the desire for the ultimate penalty for a cop killer, but there are too many questions left unanswered for which, at this long remove, there will be no certain proofs. That he was one of the two men at the scene has been established without much doubt. He was almost certainly an accessory to the killing, as was Coles. Executing one and not the other on less than total certainty of guilt does no favors for the arguments for the death penalty.
J.J.: how was Davis “almost certainly an accessory?” I haven’t come across anything that indicates that. He was definitely there, and he was definitely at the very least a witness. But the killer seems to have acted alone and impulsively in killing MacPhail.
It is not clear who was harassing the homeless man in the Burger King parking lot when MacPhail intervened and was killed. But even if Davis was part of that action, if Coles was the actual killer Davis would not be guilty even of felony murder (at least, as I understand the situation) because the harassment of the homeless man did not rise to the level of a felony. Nor is there any indication that Davis was an accessory after the fact.
Are there facts I’m missing? I certainly haven’t read exhaustively on the case.
You are still a little liberal. Coulter’s column makes just as much sense as your’s. You just get weak at the execution part of it.
Executing an innocent person is not the end of the world-but it isn’t GOOD either. There is a case to be made that both men should have been executed.
why does a public who never reads teh whole court transcript and such always second guesses them to then go for the left liberal celebrity and ngo angle…
your saying that there are holes that should have let him off…
go back and read just the wiki and the EXTREME level of looking at his case that most never ever ever get.
In 2009, the Supreme Court of the United States, voting 7 to 2, ordered the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia to consider whether new evidence “that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes [Davis’] innocence”..
how many convictions make it to the supreme court?
Davis and his defenders secured support from the public, from celebrities, and human rights groups. Amnesty International and other groups such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People took up Davis’ cause. Prominent politicians and leaders, including former President Jimmy Carter, Al Sharpton, Pope Benedict XVI, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. Congressman and one-time presidential candidate Bob Barr, and former FBI Director and judge William S. Sessions called upon the courts to grant Davis a new trial or evidentiary hearing.
Pope?
What form of rule of law is that?
The limited ability to appeal his conviction, due in part to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, was one reason cited for the international attention to the case
ah… so THATs it… revolutionaries would have a hard time getting off if the law was upheld rather than fall apart..
now i ask this one question
whomever used the gun WAS at both locations
the shooting at the party (at a pool hall) was not a sniper / and the shooting at the restaurant was not
so whoever did it, was at both locations
(unless they handed the gun off to someone else)
and so it boils down to 2 people….
read some of the witness testimony
as it does NOT reflect the idea of bad witnesses
On August 28, 1991, the jury, composed of seven black and five white members, took under two hours to find Davis guilty on one count of murder and the other offenses
sure didnt take them long…
sentencing took longer..
but the key is that all the people involved were this very dirty little clique of people all constantly in trouble with the law and lots of prior altercations
On the evening of September 21, 2011, Spencer Lawton, the former Chatham County prosecutor who put Davis on trial, responded to what he called a “public relations campaign”. Lawton was convinced of Davis’ guilt. “We have consistently won the case as it has been presented in court. We have consistently lost the case as it has been presented in the public realm, on TV and elsewhere.” Lawton called the witness recantations “suspect” because prosecutors never had the opportunity to cross-examine them. Lawton challenged the statements of former FBI Director William Sessions, former prosecutor Bob Barr and other Davis supporters. “Their credibility is hanging on a falsehood,” Lawton said. “They would know differently if they looked at the record.
news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/20/prosecutor-says-he-has-no-doubt-about-troy-davis-guilt/?hpt=hp_t1
meanwhile…
i know a bit about being falsely accused
i was falsely accused of murder and nearly went to jail when the body wandered in and said ‘hi’…
so i usually have a lot more doubt
but the key here is that unlike lots of cases where innocence is found, this one had everything but the kitchen sink and could not establish it well.
and the idea that all these famous people dont influence us to want to find the guilty innocent is absurd…
one thing i DO know..
if he had chosen better people (and that goes for me too), such would never have happend…
“He was definitely there”. So you are admitting he either did it or hung out with a cop killer.
And if it were the second case, are you saying that he didn’t know he hung out with a criminal and regularly committed crimes together? That he didn’t know that this association would never escelate into the killing of cops or others even if he didn’t pull the trigger?
In the old days a get-away driver who was in the car just waiting while his friend killed others would be just a guilty. Worse case, this is what happened here, and I think should be applied (so yes, both of them should have been executed).
In any event the jury made a decision after days and days of testamony, and the case was fought in the courts for over a decade with lawyers, judges and others with years and years of experience. Yet you now have all the answers after spending a few hours on it. You certainly haven’t lost the conceit of being a liberal.
I understand that the felony murder doctrine has been weakened by the Supreme Court, so that only the actual murderer is liable for capital punishment.
That was a foolish decision. All participants in a felony resulting directly in a death should be liable for prosecution for first-degree murder, and executed if convicted. That avoids this kind of retrospective palaver over who hit John. Davis’s case, and that of others like him, would then turn on whether or not he was an accomplice, instead of facts that have become unknowable by the time of trial.
Sometimes I wish our betters (especially including wearing black muu-muus) would give a thought to the welfare of us peasants, rather than focusing on that of the criminal class. Just a thought.
The problem when you have accomplices implicating each other is that they can create enough doubt and uncertainty that neither gets convicted. Death-penalty opponents love such cases. They don’t get nearly as upset about executions like this one. The appeals trial transcript requires careful reading, especially in regards to witnesses, such as Antoin Williams who recanted part of his testimony, but never impeached his original testimony. Page 149 onward summarizes the case.
On a scale of worth worrying about in its effect on justice, this event is less than a fart in a hurricane. The hurricane, as Artfldgr describes, is the attempt by Alinskites to pervert the system and make a way for protection of a criminal class. Our legal system is corrupt and perverted starting with the jurisprudence system of pragmatism and continuing on to allowing individual events to make law–individual events powered by public support goaded on through media and deceptive Hollywood boo-hoo movies. It started with Truman Capote and the new journalism. Look at the price he and our country has paid by allowing the malcontents to game our judicial system.
Injustice? Injustice? The injustice, here, is the co-opting of our attention on a procedural matter that is inherent in the system, which, although not perfect, should not be over-burdened by screams of outrage from those attempting to destroy it.
You will note that the Christian-Newsom murders didn’t get much ink and the execution of one of the guys who killed James Byrd didn’t get much splash.
is it a coincidence that this case and the Mumia case are suppsedly weak, and that they are cop killers?
whatever: your reasoning is flawed. Hawkins’s only previous record was for carrying a concealed weapon, to which he had pled guilty. Coles was only a cop-killer when he killed MacPhail; he had no record of cop-killing, and I have read nothing that indicated that before meeting up in the Burger King parking lot, Davis and Coles regularly hung out together or committed crimes together, even petty crimes. If you have credible links to that effect, please produce them.
If Coles was the perp, how was Davis to know he was about to become a cop-killer before he became one? Whoever killed MacPhail, it was a crime of opportunity, not a planned confrontation with a policeman.
1. Too many people on the Left and Right might have thronged to the Roman Empire’s blood sports, and to pre-modern executions featuring drawing, quartering, and burning.
2. In particular afaic, too many people on the Right are wilfully blind to abuses of law enforcement power, and to the danger that a police state/surveillance society will emerge. And to the US incarceration rate. (I’m not giving the Left a pass; far from it: but I expect conservatives to know better.)
3. There have been post-conviction exculpations using forensic technologies, e.g. DNA analysis, that were not available at the time of trial. Iirc one of the Volokh bloggers wrote that the number of such exculpations turned him from a death penalty supporter to an opponent.
Richard Aubrey: I don’t think it’s a coincidence, but probably not for the reasons you might think.
Cases in which police are killed draw an especially angry and emotional reaction from other police, for obvious reasons. The press to find the killer or killers is greater even than usual. The motivation to put pressure on possible witnesses, or to coerce them and draw forth false testimony, is greater. Whether or not that happened in the Davis case I don’t know, but there is very credible evidence (from the witnesses themselves) that it did.
Compare, also, the case featured in “The Thin Blue Line.” The convicted man there was white, so the racial aspect wasn’t present. But there was the similar situation of a policeman being killed, and the Thin Blue Line case was almost certainly a miscarriage of justice. The convicted man had also originally been on death row (although he no longer was at the time of the film), but after the film his case was reviewed and he was released from prison.
Here in California we (yesterday) just had a policeman charged with 2cnd degree murder of a transient. So, I wonder, will the movie portray that the system prosecuted the wrongdoer or will it show how all policeman are brutal killers.
There’s a Denny’s nearby where cops go for breakfast. I like to talk with them and offer to buy them breakfast. They always refuse but I’ll tell them I appreciate their service. Of course, I didn’t grow up in the big city where there is more corruption, so I never learned to dislike cops. I’ve had my run ins with them but its always been my misconduct, not theirs. The last time I told an officer I appreciated his duties, I saw a visible change take place, a relaxation. It made me think how much stress a cop endures.
Are cops corrupt? Sure, some are, but most aren’t and its got to be a hard job where the people you are protecting treat you like shit. If people started working with instead of against cops, you would see a mammoth change for the better. How about any progressives out there starting a community service in that direction. Oh no. You’ll always see them promoting hatred and distrust of authority.
gs Says:
September 22nd, 2011 at 6:06 pm
I agree with that. Conservatives talk about small government and limited government, but many of them always give the police the benefit of the doubt and act as if they can do no wrong. I especially notice this with conservatives in the media, such as talk radio.
I had never heard of this case until a couple of days ago and I haven’t studied it, so I’ll not offer an opinion. I’m pro-death penalty, but it should be used very carefully, and only in cases where the evidence is ironclad. I tend to err of the side of being lenient towards the guilty rather than unjustly punishing the innocent. I guess I still have some liberal tendencies in that respect.
I’ve had a handful of run-ins with the police in my life; fortunately all minor. In every case except one* I was guilty of the offense I was accused of. I may not have been happy about it at the time, but looking back I have to admit that the cop was right and I was wrong, and he was just doing his job. I’ve never been targeted by the police for no reason.* I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it hasn’t happened to me.
*The one exception, which I’ve written about here before, is the time I was stopped in the parking lot of a health club. The police had the parking lot staked out because of a rash of car break-ins. I walked out of the club one evening when a lunar eclipse was beginning, and wandered around the parking lot to try to get a glimpse of the rising moon. They regarded that as suspicious behavior, and stopped and questioned me. I have to admit that it probably did look suspicious from their point of view, and that their stakeout was also protecting my own car.
Conservatives talk about bifurcated government, which is self government instilled by religious and cultural institutions and only then of successive layers of government which may be limited. Without the former, the latter is not possible. Therefore, remember, when Conservatives talk about limited government, implicit in that statement is the underlying government, the government which half of our country has rejected: a small number became tax supported intellectuals; the larger number became tax supported wastrels.
They were not just “messing with” homeless man, the testimony was that they were pistol-whipping him. That’s assault, a felony. Hence, felony murder, hence they both should go down. Doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
bon homme richard: who testified that they were pistol-whipping the homeless man Young? Everything I’ve read indicates testimony about only one man beating Young. The real question was, who was that man?
What’s more, the main person who pointed to Davis as being that man was none other than Coles. Another person who identified Davis as the man beating Young was Young’s girlfriend Murray, whose testimony on the subject was all over the place.
As far as felony murder goes, it should bother you if Davis had been sentenced to death for felony murder in this case (he wasn’t, of course; his death sentence was for murder). The felony in the Davis case (which would have been aggravated assault rather than the misdemeanor of simple assault, because Young was pistol-whipped rather than just beaten) is not one to which Davis was an accomplice unless he had participated in the beating or had been part of a pre-planned conspiracy to pistol-whip the homeless man. My point is that, unless Davis had beaten the man himself (which is possible but hardly proven), he would not have been guilty of felony murder because just watching a felony does not make a person a participant in it.
See also this for a discussion of when the death penalty can be applied in felony murder cases. It appears that, unless Davis had himself pulled the trigger on MacPhail, he should not have been given the death penalty if he’d been charged with felony murder even if he had beaten Young, unless he did the beating with “reckless disregard for human life.” There is no indication it was that kind of a beating.
neo.
My point about cop-killers is that it may be a coincidence, or it may be that the left has more sympathy for cop-killers. For some reason.
I’ve read about Mumia for some time. It appears that the left continues to throw out minutiae, passing over the solid evidence, to convince the unwary.
Some years ago, Mrs. Faulkner was to give a talk at some small private college and was booed by the student body. The issue of fact in the murder is not the issue in the Mumia case.
So I get suspicious when a cop-killer’s case is deemed shaky.
It appears from some reports that Davis’ shorts with blood on them were discovered but excluded by virtue of faulty search documentation.
There’s a huge problem with becoming a Monday morning quarterback especially with regards to trials, and that is it subverts our system of justice which relies on the jury and associated system of judge, attorneys and law. It’s just sad to see so much effort expended, puppet like, for a cause little likely to improve our jurisprudence and most likely to harm it. I am reminded of the Rodney King case where the jury acquitted the police officers, an event so unappealing when only the video is considered. Here, much more is available than merely a video, but honestly, Ms. Ratchet, can we move on to some new business. Mac said something about a world series?
I’m trying to be nice, but here’s what gets me:
“Troy Davis has been executed by the state of Georgia after 22 years on death row. Before his death he had become a cause célé¨bre, and–unlike some such cases–it was with good reason.”
Please, agreeing with the leftist mostest-wrongest-pubescent-bull-shitiest vehicle for promoting Orwellian confusion where criminal gets celebritized is a no, no, no, no. It’s more than an intellectual game. I’m not expressing it quite right and maybe someone can express the essence better, but something is wrong with placing this man’s face as the victim.
How strange that a thread that questioned the justice system with regards to trial courts, and appeal processes morphed into a screed against cops.
Oldflyer: where’s the screed against cops?
The vast majority of cops are hard-working, upright people who are doing a tough job against difficult odds and in dangerous conditions.
That does not change the fact that some are coercive and duplicitous, as in all fields. Take a long at the videos here for an example,
And Curtis, just because the left says something doesn’t make it wrong in all circumstances. It may make some people uncomfortable to find themselves agreeing with the left in certain circumstances, but I have no trouble agreeing with whomever I think is correct in a particular set of circumstances. If it happens to be the left on occasion, so be it. I’m not interested in parroting the party line of either party.
That said, I do not agree with the left’s assertion that racism had anything to do with this case. Nor am I saying Davis is innocent. I am saying that the facts are iffy enough that this man should not have been put to death.
As far as “Monday-morning quarterbacking” goes, this is not a football game. A man was put to death here, and discussing whether or not the punishment fit the facts of the case is highly appropriate and in the finest legal tradition.
I haven’t the matter enough to know if he is guilty or innocent. But having spent most of my adult life working in the legal profession, I have become opposed to the death penalty because I know how often and easily mistakes are made. And death is the one mistake that can never be corrected.
Ooops … meant to say “I haven’t studied the matter enough to know if he is guilty or innocent.”
It’s not unthinkable for the Left to use whomever they can get to bolster their evil. This kind of alliance does not automatically render the Left good in defending an innocent man, nor the presumed guilty party pardoned of all crimes in the eyes of justice if not the law.
Police unions are irrevocably allied with the Left, although the rot has not spread everywhere in all states. Such pressure from the unions can easily distract police from pursuing justice and instead pursuing a “case” that “looks good to the public” because it is an easier case to make in a court controlled by lawyers and judges.
I don’t particularly believe in elevating police to some aristocrat status where crimes against the aristocracy are deemed to be deserving of HIGHER punishment than crimes against the peons: meaning the rest of you all.
I’m known as an eternal advocate of getting rid of the Left. But getting rid of the Left, doesn’t mean attacking everyone the Left claims as their ally. No more than it did when fighting AL Qaeda in the Sunni Triangle.
It is precisely because death cannot be corrected that the death penalty is necessary. If this guy had been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, on loose evidence, few people would have given a damn either way whether he was guilty or not. The fact that he was executed, elevates his case in both the eyes of the public as well as the eyes of human affairs.
Even more mistakes would be made, on the basis that one can always “correct” the issue for life imprisonment. But that avoids the issue of justice.
One of my neighbors is a retired cop. He was loathe to reveal his former occupation when we first met because he had found that many people, for whatever reasons, just have an aversion to cops. Maybe it’s leftover from the 60s and campus protests, the southern freedom marches, the Democrat Convention riot, or ? Maybe it’s the image of Bull Connors and other racist or fascist type police with dogs. Maybe it’s just that some have had bad encounters during traffic stops. Whatever the reason, it seems to my neighbor to be fairly widespread. When he learned that I held no ill feelings toward cops, he relaxed and we’re now good friends.
He has told me stories that have gotten my attention. It’s a tough job and dangerous in the bargain. On the other hand, he freely admits there are cops who overstep their authority or are too nervous about the dangers to be able to do the job well. He believes they should be weeded out, but not without the proper hearings and procedures.
Back to the case. I’m pro death penalty, but think the evidence should meet a much higher standard than this one seemed to. Just an opinion as I’m no authority.
Thankfully, the supreme court is smarter than all of you cop killer apologists and came to the correct conclusion. One less murderer walks the planet.
p.s. I worked for 4 years in a prison and just because they get “life’ doesn’t mean they stop killing. I witnessed murder after murder by inmate on inmate. That make you all warm and fuzzy knowing you saved a killer from death so he could go on and kill again? But if it’s inmates on inmates it’s OK, huh!? Hypocrites.
Definitely agree that the life of a policeman is not worth more than that of a civilian. The response, however, to killing a policeman should be larger than a civilian because of economy: it would be perfect if we could prosecute each murder with full resources but we cannot, therefore, we save full on no holds barred investigation and prosecution for murderers of policeman recongnizing that if that line of protection is surrendered, the whole shebang is surrendered. ‘Anarchy and all that, isn’t it? Policeman represent the rule of law and if they may be killed, then we may be killed. The Utopians, however, want a perfect world where perfect policeman exist. When that doesn’t happen, they explode with indignation. Well, what happens when they become the policeman? Can you say Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Castro . . . Obama. Let’s extrapolate to nations: Soviet Union, Cuba, China, OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference), EU … and soon if we don’t do something about it … the United States.
Yep. The progressives intend us to dethrone ourselves with their devious moral arguments which ultimately always question any authority but their own. Then, when they get in power, no more questions.
I read Ann Coulter’s column and it convinced ME. 37 eye witnesses at a Burger King parking area is good enough for me.
Funny how the murderer of James Byrd didn’t have the usual whiners, Desmond Tutu, Al Sharpton, Hollywood, the Pope, crying outside that murdering bastard’s kick off to Hell. Why is that?
Having said that, I have no problem with these cases going under a microscope. And I disagree with knee jerk accusations that Neo is still a liberal. Bob Barr is NO liberal, and an honorable man.
Wow. See Ann Barnhardt’s posts entitled “There Must Be a Reckoning (Part 1 & 2)”.
I can’t link to her individual posts, but the link to her site is http://barnhardt.biz/index.cfm
Did anybody read
http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/09/21/there-is-no-travesty-of-justice-in-georgia-executive-troy-davis/?
It seems convincing to me. The most stinking aspect of campaign in defence of Troy is that nobody of recanting witnesses were required to testify their recanting before court, under oath. Why it was so? They were under constant pressure from press and activists, so I do not believe them. If you know that your testimony can save innocent person from death, you should say this under oath. Everything else is hypocrisy and posturing.
I can not agree that some categories of citizen do not deserve better protection from criminals than everebody else. Cops are literally under fire every day. They need more strong deterence from crime against them, more harsh punishment for crimes against them and even less stringent standard for attaining conviction. Criminals must think twice before attemting attack them. In war zone, martial law is applied, with not so heavy burden of proof and lesser procedural complications. Cops are always in war zone. The same for judges and elected officials.
No system is perfect, so it is impossible to absolutely rule out convictions of innocents. Some pragmatic compromiss should be sought, so that necessary level of deterence be maintained without iintroducing reign of terror. Impunity of criminals also produces reign of terror, only imposed not by government, but by criminal gangs (see Mexico). The optimal solution is a middle ground between impunity of police and impunity of criminals, that is, optimal level of government terror. This gives to law-abiding citizens the best protection from both.
Not entirely OT.
The opponents of the death penalty insist that life without possibility of parole would be the best sentence for such heinous crimes.
All those who think such folks would not, instantly, start inveighing against such an inhumane penalty as LWOP, raise your hand.
Anybody? Somebody turn up the lights. Anybody? Even one person?
Thought so.
Jim Kearney: maybe 37 eyewitnesses at a Burger King parking area is good enough for you. But there were not 37 witnesses in the Burger King parking lot. There were not even 34, the number Ann Coulter would have you believe there were (and you fell right into her trap).
Let me make it clear: there were 34 witnesses of all types for the prosecution, but nowhere near 34 eyewitnesses. I have had a little bit of trouble ascertaining the exact number of eyewitnesses at the Burger King who testified against Davis, but most sources say there were 7 eyewitnesses, plus 2 people who say Davis confessed to them (this source, however, gives the number as follows: “four eyewitnesses identifying Davis in court as the shooter…two additional witnesses saying they saw Davis wearing a white T-shirt around the time of the shooting, and two more saying they saw Coles wearing a yellow shirt”…and “three other witnesses testifying under oath that Davis confessed to them”). At any rate, nowhere near either 34 or 37.
Of those eyewitnesses and the people who said Davis confessed to them, all but two have since recanted their original testimony and now say they were coerced to identify Davis, and don’t really know who did it. The agreement that remains among them is that the shooter probably wore a white shirt—but it was never made clear whether Davis wore a white shirt that night or not.
Of those eyewitnesses who have never recanted, one is Coles, whom Davis says is the real shooter (and who may in fact be; we really don’t know), and a man named Sanders who was in a van at the Burger King. Sanders had originally said he would not be able to identify the shooter, but at the trial he identified Davis as the shooter. That is the sum total of the eyewitness testimony that has not been recanted.
Just to give you an idea of the flavor of the thing, here are some quotes from the affidavit in which one of the witnesses, Collins (who was an acquaintance of Davis and was present at the shooting), recanted his prior testimony:
Most of the recanting affidavits are much like that; you can read some excerpts from them here, at the blog of someone called “the skeptical juror,” and who has done a lot of good research on the case and written many posts about it.
It is difficult if not impossible to know when the witnesses were telling the truth: in their original statements to police, in their later testimony (which in many instances is different, and more specific as to who did it), or in their recantations. The point is that the case is a mess, and messy cases are not appropriate ones for the death penalty.
Oh, and the other point is that Ann Coulter’s column is purposely misleading.
I’ll let the jury of his peers make determinations of fact and reasonable doubt, as they have done so in this case.
Monday morning quarterbacks can make for interesting reading, but will only discuss the items that fit into their idea of how things were. No matter how much digging you do into this case, you will not have the same presentations that the jury received. Even if you pored over the transcripts, you will color your review with your own perceptions and doubts that were not present for the jury when they made their own deliberations.
After-the-fact recantations and discoveries are just as unreliable as those presented to the jury for obvious reasons. All this is why the appellate process is there to make certain that the convicted received a fair trial, not to second guess the jury.
I’m okay knowing that Troy Davis is no longer with us.
Based on my one horrible year of law school and a lot of general knowledge, it seems to me that the only way to really get a good handle on whether this guy was guilty or not is to carefully read the entire trial transcript–just this document alone could conceivably run to many thousands of pages–with a full knowledge of the law and legal procedure, plus complete knowledge of what evidence was admitted and, more importantly, excluded, and what each piece of that evidence was and its quality.
It would also be immensely helpful if you had been in the court room to see the evidence presented and the witnesses testify, and to note the demeanor of the judge, lawyers, the defendant and witnesses..
Absent this kind of comprehensive knowledge about the case in question, and knowledge of the intricacies of the legal system and the law, I don’t think that-on the outside looking in–it is really possible to second guess such a trial, in the midst of a propaganda war by people who do not have anywhere near all the evidence but who do have very strong ideological motives to push their various stances.
Absent such comprehensive and informed knowledge I just don’t think that you can really second guess this or any other major trial.
Wallo has made some good points.
I realize that Wilipedia is not always correct, but it appears that there were some shorts which had forensic evidence which was rejected because the police didn’t have a proper search warrant. If we are going to try the case informally, extrajudiciallly, then the normal rules of evidence don’t apply, especially if we are basing much of our opinion on informal converstaions which are not under oath. If we want to know the “real” answer, we should find out what was on the shorts.
If Davis was innocent, he had incredibly bad luck, to be at the scene of two unrelated shootings in one night. I wonder how often that happens to innocent people? Perhaps in the hood those things are possible, except it appears that Davis was more than just an innocent bystander. In the first shooting, he was involved in an argument with the man who was shot. According to the prosecutor, the reason Davis was at the scene of the second shooting is because he voluntarily joined up with Mr. Coles shortly after the first shooting. Perhaps the prosecutor was wrong, and Davis just happened on the scene of the murder, committed by a man he didn’t know. If so, how did Coles know him well enough to identify him and to falsely accuse him? What an unlucky man Mr. Davis must be, an innocent bystander, in two unrelated shootings, in one night!
As an aside, I might note that the majority of the professors that taught me at the mid-tier Eastern seaboard law school I attended in the mid 1970s made it quite explicitly clear that “the Law” had nothing to do with either Truth, Justice, Morality or even very much to do with the Constitution, and that, apparently, they were just there to teach me the mentality, the rules and tricks of the Trade or “Game” so that I, as a hired gun, could win for my clients, and earn a good living.
People attending other law schools may have had different experiences and reactions but these were mine.
I took from all that they said and all that they didn’t say, and their attitudes that, in their view, it was, at base, all about “billable hours,” and that all that maudlin malarkey about Morality and Justice and the Constitution was for chumps who didn’t know the score.
Obviously, I was far more naive and far less cynical than I should have been, but for the first time in my life and academic career I heard professors espousing things that I considered to be evil, ideas and values that I wanted to have nothing to do with. Such a proud, “in your face,” grasping, cynical, and amoral Luciferian attitude on the part of my “professors” was one of the main reasons I left law school after I passed my finals and won my moot court case at the end of my first year, and never looked back.
I’m pro-death penalty, but the guilt must be virtually 100% certain. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” isn’t a strong enough standard for death penalty cases.
There have been way too many cases where death row inmates were convicted on mistaken eyewitness testimony or circumstantial evidence who were later exonerated by DNA evidence. Numerous studies have shown that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
For that reason, I am almost to the point where the only convictions for which the death penalty is appropriate are ones in which the prosecution relied on indisputable DNA evidence to establish guilt. I say I’m almost to that point because I do not want that to be the de facto standard. I’m sure there are other absolutely ironclad cases where a conviction can be established without DNA evidence. For example, an uncoerced, believeable confessions. But when DNA is heavily relied on by the prosecution to establish guilt, then I’m much more comfortable with the death penalty.
The only thing I had read about this case was Ann Coulter’s column about it. And after reading her thoughts, I believed a guilty man was executed.
But now that I read neo-neocon’s post, I am not so sure. Good post, neo-neocon.
Ain’t it just wonderful that 24 hours of reading on the topic should call into question a mere 22+ years of trials, appeals. etc., etc.?
Oh yeah, let’s poll the uninformed and patently(?) unbiased prominences while we’re at it, the Pope, Sharpton, et al.
This whole discussion is tinged by wishful thinking. Jurors must go with the evidence at hand. Declaring the death penalty contingent on ‘incontrovertible’ evidence like DNA simply ensures wider use of gloves and condoms in violent crime commission. DNA evidence is not absolute proof positive, either…there is usually a one in a billion chance of shared DNA with another. Is that beyond reasonable doubt?
And Troy looks like such a nice black man, with glasses, so he must be innocent? The protestors in this matter have all been suckered by manipulation. I saw no reference above to his prior guilty plea re weapon possession, and that a shell casing matching that weapon was found at the murder scene. But maybe I scanned too fast.
Society is totally screwed up these days. In ideal reality, what humans should strive to create is prisons that protect the prisoners from the vengeful and all powerful citizen militia OUTSIDE the prison, rather than protect the weak sheep citizens from the vengeful rapists inside the prisons. Society is also totally screwed up concerning the police. It is not the police that protect the citizens, but the citizens that provide information and support to the police so that the police don’t get themselves shot from all sides of the war front.
All in all, the power of citizens overlap and overpower that of the police, yet many people elevate the police above that of the citizen peace officer just because… big government must be really convenient.
“I’ll let the jury of his peers make determinations of fact and reasonable doubt, as they have done so in this case.”
They’re not a jury of my peers. And I am not in the habit of letting strangers do my thinking for me, let alone the federal government.
To wit, it doesn’t really matter who is on the side of Davis or not. What matters is their reason for joining either side: whether such a reason is just or right.
Those that join against Davis because they seek to elevate the police to some superior social and legal position, are wrong. In that fashion lies the road to serfdom, which the USA is already on.
Those that join Davis because they control police unions and want to ramp up black crime and fear amongst police officers, are not on the side of justice either.
Justice does not guarantee that all the people on the side of “good” are actually good or even half way right. Nor that all the people on the side of evil are wrong or pursuing injustice. That is what makes eyewitness testimonies and human nature so difficult for people to understand.
For one thing, propaganda and hypnosis easily can convince men and women to believe whatever they are told to believe. Thus eyewitnesses are basically hearsay to me, but in the eyes of the law it is not hearsay. Look at Obama for one thing: he is the evidence that it all works the way I say it does. And Obama isn’t a cop staring you in the face threatening you with imprisonment when he tells you to pin the crime on a black guy. Interrogation, force, coercion, are very effective ways to “convince” people to say what they are told to say. If they are told to say the truth, they will. If they are told to say a convenient lie because that’s what people want to hear, that will be what they produce for consumption.
Secondly, so many Americans have been programmed to allow the courts, the lawyers, the judges, aforementioned strangers they somehow like to call “peers” who they wouldn’t trust to walk their dog in a public park, and the federal Government to do the thinking for aforementioned Americans. Why? Because it must be so easy and convenient. After all, who becomes a lawyer other than politicians, people who like cheating over ethics/morality, and power mad fools? Not many others besides those, amongst the affirmative action crowd. For every Thompson, there’s 10 Obamas. So it is very easy to trust those people to interpret the law, because ordinary folks can’t understand the law anyways. So it’s better to just outsource this issue entirely. Unwise and dangerous, but easy. Anyways, to cut to the point, Americans used to think for themselves, make independent judgments, and take ownership of their conscience. Now they just sit around and let the government and strangers in robes tell them what to think, what is right, and who is or is not guilty. They let the system have power over them… yet start complaining when that system is corrupt or unjust.
The reason why the system is corrupt is because people uninstall their brains and install what’s called “belief in higher authority”. It doesn’t matter whether the person is right or not in making the judgment themselves. You can call it ignorant, or foolish, or unwise. But there is an ocean of difference between a person that makes their own decisions in life and a person who allows “authority” to make decisions for them. You know, important ones like what is true and what is false, what is ethical and what not is not ethical.
Intellectual in honesty recommends that one witholds judgment and neither confers truth or falsity upon a belief or proclamation without adequate evidence. It did NOT recommend one outsource one’s judgment abilities to other people…. who nobody knows.
Don Carlos: the casing evidence was also very iffy. In doing my research for this post, I found about 10 different descriptions of the casings, all quite cursory. The gist of it was that (a) casings were found at both shootings which a ballistics expert said might have matched each other but he wasn’t sure; and (b) there were several casings at the site of the first shooting, but only one at the site of the second shooting, and it was “supposedly” (whatever that means) found by a homeless man there.
Couldn’t find a thing that described this further. So the casing evidence seemed about as weak as the eyewitness evidence.
As for the jury that deliberated originally, I made it clear that they returned a very reasonable verdict based on the evidence they saw at the time. I wrote, “The evidence [for Davis’s guilt] at the trial seemed fairly powerful at the time, although subsequent developments have made it less so.” So I made it clear that it was the subsequent developments that make me think the original sentence (not even necessarily the original verdict) should have been commuted. Death is not the proper penalty for a case where this many questions were raised.
And if you are not reading-comprehension-challenged, you would see that the other point is that the 22+ years of appeals required Davis to prove he was innocent, which is not an acceptable standard. Many legal minds on the right agree that Davis should not have been put to death on this sort of evidence. If that doesn’t give you pause, it certainly should.
Yes, there are people who think Davis innocent, and think so because he looks like a “nice black man.” I am not one of them, nor is (for example) William Sessions. I couldn’t care less how nice he looks or what race he is. It would have been fine to commute his sentence to life imprisonment; the death penalty should be reserved for more unequivocal cases.
Dennis: yes, I thought when reading the record that Davis was either one of the unluckiest men in the world to be at the scene of two shootings in one night, or he was guilty, guilty, guilty. Also that, in the ‘hood in ’89 in Savannah, perhaps shootings were pretty commonplace in the young black male population.
But I advocate a commutation of his sentence even if he was guilty, to life imprisonment, because the evidence and testimony against him were just too weak to justify death.
As for the shorts—again, piecing together the most reliable reports I read about that, it seems that (a) there was some sort of stain seen, supposedly, on shorts that he supposedly had worn and that had been washed; and (b) the evidence was excluded because a proper search warrant had not been executed; and (c) it is not known whether it was blood or something else, and it most definitely was not DNA-tested; and (d) the shorts were black; my query is how can you see bloodstains on black shorts?
This is from one of the appeals rulings (note, also, how Erick Erickson of Red State has, like some of the other bloggers and pundits on the right, distorted the record for his own purposes):
The “Davis must be executed!” forces kept waving the bloody shorts. But would you like to be convicted and put to death on evidence like that?
Neo rebuts, “the other point is that the 22+ years of appeals required Davis to prove he was innocent, which is not an acceptable standard.”
Well, that’s how it worked, and works. There were evidently no other grounds for mandating a new trial, no procedural errors. It was 22+ years of due process. Due process. That you don’t approve of the result, and thus the process….Well, it is acceptable to me.
She does not respond to my observation that 22+ years cannot be properly, accurately reviewed in 24 hours.
I didn’t approve the original OJ verdict, but it’s the same due process. Did I and the like-minded agitate for reversal of an acquittal? No; we do not do that in criminal trials. Period. Davis had 22+ years of appeals, for Pete’s sake.
As Wolla pointed out, the Law often has not as much to do with Justice as it does with debate, a human exercise with winners and losers where no one bats 1000.
Don Carlos:
I am relying not just on my own reading, but on reading the conclusions of people who have spent huge amounts of time analyzing the record of this case.
But I find it incredibly offensive and even dangerous that you think one cannot challenge courts and their decisions if one doesn’t spend years and years studying a case. No matter how many years have gone on and how many decisions are made along a certain line, that does not mean they’re right. The history of the court system (and yes, I am concerned with justice in the court system; your mileage may differ) is rife with decisions that have gone a certain way for years and yet are wrong, and I reserve my right to judge them wrong. My judgments are not binding; I am not a judge. But I am a thinking citizen who uses logic to form an opinion and to write about it.
I didn’t get into the next topic because my post would have been a book, but the main reason Davis did not win his appeals is that within the last 20 years or so the court system has made appeals much more difficult to win. I think that in the case of the death penalty it has been made too difficult, because the decision to put a man to death should be made only in very very strong cases. Davis’s case is just not that strong, and it doesn’t take years and years of study to see that. Any case where there is virtually no strong forensic evidence, and which relies almost completely on eyewitness testimony that is then recanted, should not result in a death penalty, or if it does then the death penalty should be commuted to life in prison.
Don Carlos: also, about justice and the law—
Wolla Dalbo described a cynicism at the law school he attended, a cynicism about justice that offended him and was probably at least part of the reason he quit law school. That does not mean that all law schools are like that (they are not, although cynicism is indeed rife in the law, at law schools, and among lawyers). However, this cynicism is irrelevant to what we as citizens should desire from the law, or even what the law aspires to itself—which is justice.
The entire adversary system of law in this country, which relies on what you call debate (although of course it is a very stylized debate, with many rules, and a debate mainly through the proxy of interrogating witnesses and cross-examining them), has as an ideal the closest approximation of justice possible. The thought is that, through evenly matched adversaries presenting the case for each side, justice is obtained.
Yes, it very often—all too often—is not obtained. But we need to strive for it as much as possible, and that is what my post is trying to do. The cynicism you display when you write that the law is not about justice but is “a human exercise with winners and losers where no one bats 1000” is dismaying and offputting. You may just shrug at the injustice done to the “losers,” as though this is a baseball game, but I do not.
Davis and Coles regularly hung out together or committed crimes together, even petty crimes. If you have credible links to that effect, please produce them.
you mentioned it… the gun sentence…
In July 1988, Davis pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed weapon; he was fined $250 as part of a plea agreement in which a charge of possession of a gun with altered serial numbers was dropped
so he was previously arrested with an illegal gun with all trace markings removed… you know how they get in the way when rabbit hunting…
want to know WHY all this?
US execution puts death penalty on trial
Troy Davis is set to die in under a week but advocates say there is ‘too much doubt’ to condemn him to death.
english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/09/2011917143731110559.html
what is the RELIGION of Troy Davis?
Coverage of any religion angle is very hard to find
but why would al jazeera get involved if he was jewish, christian, or mormon?
his last words were interesting…
His last words were: ‘I’d like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I’m not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother. I am innocent.’
personally, impersonally? That he didn’t care and so it wasn’t personal and not his fault? why add the word ‘personally’? what does it allude to?
what does this mean:
I’m not the one who killed your son, your father, your brother
vs this:
I’m not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother
the rest of his last words:
‘The incident that happened that night is not my fault. I did not have a gun. All I can ask… is that you look deeper into this case so that you really can finally see the truth.’ ‘For those about to take my life, God have mercy on your souls. And may God bless your souls.’
my query is how can you see bloodstains on black shorts?
with your eyes… 🙂
you know… IMAGINING reality is so much easier than actually SEEING reality…
you can see blood on black shorts… it dries red don’t you know… when WET its dark and has a red tint as the black absorbs the light, but when dry its red…
your doing the old liberal knows by thinking erronously about reality… BAD HABITS ARE HARD TO BREAK 🙂
from a forensics site:
One of the empirical tests for determining if a stain is blood is its appearance. If it is a bloodstain, then it should look like blood.
while its well known that blood on dark surfaces is hard to see… it DOES have its qualities…
and one should also note this..
if his pants were not stained with blood from the victim and spray from the shot, what were they stained with?
there aint a lot of stuff one stains their underwear with on or off…
if you want to find out more… and dig into it go here
the national criminal justice reference service
https://www.ncjrs.gov/
[if you cant handle real images of real life, then be careful when reading in any forensics stuff… i was an EMT at one time… and saw my first autopsy when i was a teen… so nothing there bothers me anymore… but others may have nightmares… the common and contemporary settings and lack of movie games actually makes them sadder and more appaling in many ways… (like the time we had to remove the transvestite into self asphixiation and huffing… not much different than the guys that had to remove David Carradine after a similar mistake in judgment. but dont think a partner keeps you safer – didnt help john belushi, quite the opposite. ]
I find it faintly amusing and more than a little aggravating that a few here simply cannot grasp that the argument neo is making is not that Davis is “not guilty / innocent” of the crime for which he was convicted, but simply and plainly that, during the time it took to carry out the execution and exhaust the appeals, enough evidence was either produced or questioned that the sentence of death was the wrong sentence.
In addition, she is at pains in the original article and the responses in the thread to state over and over that her chief concern is not Davis per se (although he is the focus) but the odd, blunt, obtuse,and unjust methods employed by the state to make sure the sentence was carried out no matter what.
It’s not about what was done in this case so much as it is about the power to do it in any case. And that should give thoughtful people pause no matter how they feel about Davis or the death penalty.
Matt Feeny at The American Scene addresses this more grisly reality when he writes:
“The specter of the state pondering the ultimacy of the sentence it’s about to execute — the dignity and gravity it would seem to call for, the juridical certainty it would seem to require — as against the earthy politics that underlay the prosecution and the inherently flawed procedures used to reach that sentence, and the fact that in executing the sentence it is depriving itself of the prospect of redeeming those flaws (which prospect implicitly underwrites all of its non-capital judgments), and then having the official and unofficial process of appeal and critique carry on for however many months or years, perhaps tilting the balance of judgment in the direction of greater and more reasonable doubt, if not into wide belief in actual innocence, and then having the state, anxious to avoid the appearance of self-doubt and, indeed, anxious to assert the primacy of its decisive powers over doubt and the procedures that encode it in this high-stakes moment it’s brought upon itself, stand (figuratively) at a podium with a defiant sneer on its official lips and say: “Fuck it. Kill him anyway.””
…. “The state says, and invites its citizens to say: We are literally beyond caring about the truth, or, we reject that our convictions about the truth should be linked to valid procedures for discovering it. Our actions in this moment testify to our unquestioned capacity to act, our power to set the terms of legitimacy in action by acting.”
http://theamericanscene.com/2011/09/23/doubt-fucking
It’s a pretty cold reality Feeny is staring at, but isn’t that what this side of the political spectrum in America is always touting itself as? Those who can face reality?
Artfldgr: I asked for evidence that Davis and Coles regularly hung out together and committed crimes together, which is what that commenter was alleging. No such evidence was provided. Davis’s gun possession, which I mentioned, had nothing to do with Coles, nothing to do with hanging out together, and nothing to do with committing petty crimes together, all of which the commenter had alleged happened. I would guess that it was quite commonplace in 1989 among a population of young black males to have an illegal gun; it does not tell us anything about the relation between Coles and Davis, nor does it tell us anything about whether Davis killed MacPhail (which, as I’ve said many times, he might have done).
Did you read what the court said about the “bloodstains?” And you are wrong; you see stains on black shorts; you cannot tell by eyeballing the shorts whether they are bloodstains. The court has acknowledged that whatever stains were on the shorts, their identity is not known (not just whether the blood belonged to MacPhail, but whether it was blood at all).
I am very familiar with the look of bloodstains, because I am a woman (I’m not going to get any more graphic than that). You cannot necessarily tell bloodstains on a black garment. What other stains could have been there? For starters, tomato sauce, or Davis’s own blood (or someone else’s) from some previous incident (cut finger, cut leg, playing basketball, etc.).
I am getting tired of repeating myself on this thread.
After the wreck the Left made of black families, many sons turned to crime in the inner cities, not because they thought crime was good but because it was the only cultural acceptable thing for black hoodies to do. Blacks often carried guns in the hood or the inner cities because they didn’t want to get shot without at least some deterrence.
And of course, by hanging around violent, crazy people, Davis was eventually involved in shootings and other anti social or asocial phenomenon, regardless of whether he found a reason to kill someone or his buddy found a reason to pin the killing on Davis to save himself.
Klavan’s Identity Man and Katrina both showed interesting glimpses into how this process can work. The refugees from Katrina didn’t all just become law abiding citizens, after they left the cess pool of New Orleans owned and operated by Democrat fat cats.
The ones that became lawyers and police officers still thinking they were going to fight for the right and pure, eventually burned out (As Bookworm did). The police forces are full of people who burned out from seeing criminals they caught re-released back into the public, for no particularly good reason. They began to understand that nobody cares whether they are fighting for justice or not, so they gave up and gave into the system. They did only enough to please the system, and no more. If the system said to release the guy, they would. If the system said to execute the guy, they would. Because the authorities had deemed it right and just, and the cops were just too tired to do anything other than obey.
These are the Best of the Best. The worst of the worst are cops who go into the biz wanting to exercise authority and power of their own: for corruption or simply personal satisfaction.
If the Iraqi occupation forces had this doctrine embedded in their organization, we would never have been able to quell the unrest in Iraq. Yet in America, many Americans accept this naive or corrupt system for their courts and police systems as if it was just par for the course: a natural inhibition.
I hadn’t heard of this case before it came out in the news a couple of days ago, but I take all “innocent prisoner” stories with a grain of salt. You can read about Roger Coleman on Wikipedia – his case received national attention in the early 1990s. My memory of that story is that story after story claimed his innocence, with the exception of one scathing piece in Reader’s Digest, which convinced me of his guilt. Coleman’s guilt was confirmed in 2006 through better DNA testing.
My opinion, which I admit is not based on the specifics of this case, is that the news media and capital punishment opponents routinely slant the facts of these cases to claim innocence. If Troy Davis was innocent, similar previous stories didn’t do him any favors.
The problem with coming back to a case like this one is that with time the uncertainties almost always grow and familiarity with evidence diminishes.
(An exception might be OJ’s case – one case in which the certainties have only grown that he is guilty of murder. Can we get a redo on that one and put him on death row?) And because of that it’s easy to wedge open doubt.
I was on a jury once in which we found the guy innocent and right after the trial we learned that certain evidence had been withheld for technical reasons that if we had known would have made conviction almost a certainty.
Anyway, in this case the officer’s blood was found on Davis’ shorts, but the evidence was excluded because the police searched his home prior to obtaining a proper warrant.
http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/09/21/there-is-no-travesty-of-justice-in-georgia-executive-troy-davis/
If true, along with some of the other points made by Erikson above, I’m comfortable that justice was done although a bit delayed.
Otiose: I am outraged at the repetition of lies about this case (not outraged at you personally, but at bloggers and columnists such as Hawkins, Erickson, and Coulter who repeat the lies and should know better).
But you seem to have missed my comment where I debunked the idea that blood was found on Davis’s shorts. Please read this again; it’s from Judge Moore’s ruling in one of Davis’s appeals:
Remember, that’s the judge speaking, summarizing the “evidence” about blood on the shorts.
1. Mr Davis fled the crime scene instead of assisting the shot policeman.
2. While fleeing the crime scene can be explained because of fear of getting shot, mr Davis did not go to the police afterwards to provide information that could help solve the crime that happened when he was present. For example, he did not go to the police to tell them about his suspicions against mr Coles.
3. Instead, mr Davis left town within 24 hrs after the crime, without informing the police. He staid put in Atlanta while knowing the police were looking for him.
4. mr Davis did not accuse mr Coles during his first trial(s).
5. mr Coles never volunteered to release the forensic evidence found on his clothes. This evidence – most probably blood or gunpowder – was never provided to the jury because it was illegally obtained. But if he were innocent, why not allow this evidence to be provided to the jury?
6. In his hearing in 2010, mr Davis did not call a single witness to the stand, apparently fearing that the “recanting” witnesses would not stick to their (probably lawyer-drafted) affidavits.
7. Even though the hearing in 2010 was scheduled with months of preparation time available to the defence, the defence subpoenaed the only credible other suspect, mr Coles, only a day before the hearing (if they subpoenaed him at all) – thereby squashing any opportunity to redeem mr Davis.
Mr Davis, in other words, was most probably the shooter. If he was not, then, by not stepping forward to the police, staying silent about Coles’ role, he was basically covering for the real murderer, mr Coles.
Tough luck.
(previous post: under 5) it should say Mr Davis instead of mr Coles.
Seriously, a guy runs away from a crime scene, does not inform the police, is identified by several witnesses, flees town, stays put while in town, gets many retrials, gets a break because incriminating evidence is not made available, declines to call a single witness to the stand and declines to deliver in time a subpoena the guy who according to him (well, after 10 years of thinking about it) DID murder MacPhail.
By the way, the statements by neo-neocon that blood on his trousers does not prove anything is a joke. He would have to explain where that blood came from. Secondly, if the blood matched the type of MacPhail, and not that of him, even more so.
The most innocent – albeit cosmically unlikely – explanation is that Troy has been a willing patsy who basically took the fall for Coles, out of fear, ‘hood solidarity, or whatever. By not coming clean with the justice system, not providing information about a crime that happened when he was present, fleeing town, etc., he managed to get himself convicted.
Tough look, Troy.
Jummy: “tough luck” is a completely unacceptable (and repulsive, IMHO) attitude to have about a capital case.
I am really getting tired of repeating myself here, but I believe the issues are important and so I will: this isn’t about whether Davis was innocent or guilty. The evidence used to convict him was incredibly poor, and time (and the recantations) has only made it seem worse. No one, guilty or innocent, should be sentenced to death on such weak evidence. Almost every single eyewitness (or witness who alleged Davis confessed) has ended up impeaching him/herself: either they were telling the truth in the trial and lying when they recanted, or they were lying at the trial and are telling the truth in the recantations. Either way, you have a majority of the evidence given by liars.
This is about the rule of law. Davis was under no compulsion to surrender the shorts evidence without a proper search warrant, and no one should use such actions to justify putting a person to death.
If, heaven forbid, I were unjustly accused of a crime and believed the police had reason to want to frame me (and if my lawyer advised me), I would not be voluntarily giving them evidence they could twist and use against me, even if I were innocent.
The failure to call Coles as witness at the hearing was explained by Davis’s lawyers as being because Coles would only be defending his innocence. I believe this was a wrong move on the part of the lawyers (who did try to call him at the end, when they saw it really seemed necessary). It is certainly an indication that the Davis team might have felt Davis would somehow be implicated by Coles and that Coles’s testimony would reflect poorly on Davis. But that is hardly the sort of “evidence” on which an execution should rest.
And it is manifestly untrue that no witnesses were called by Davis in the 2010 hearing (another thing I’m tired of is the number of either lies and/or errors stated by people arguing Davis got what he deserved). If you look at the Moore judgment, he goes into great detail about the testimony of four of Davis’s recanting witnesses at the 2010 hearing: Collins, Sapp, Williams, and McQueen.
Davis’s flight is not evidence of guilt, as you yourself have said.
Another thing I think people ignore in this case is that most everyone—many of the witnesses, both possible perps (Coles and Davis), and even the victim of the harassment (the homeless man, Young) were a member of a class of people who had reason to distrust and fear the police, rightly or wrongly. I say this not to justify or excuse MacPhail’s killing—an abominable and heinous crime—but to explain why so many people (almost everyone, actually) were uncooperative or changing in their stories. If you read the Moore summary of the testimony in the first trial (which I have) it is dizzyingly confusing, so much of the testimony contradicts itself, and there is so little forensic evidence (none, actually; there was a little forensic evidence for the Cloverdale shooting part of the trial). Many of the people involved, including some of the witnesses, regularly carried illegal guns, and there were not just the two shooting among this crowd that night (the Cloverdale shooting and the MacPhail murder), but a third shooting connected with the Cloverdale party.
I read the entire Moore ruling, which is close to 200 pages, and I have to say that the more I read the more dismayed I became about the mess that constituted evidence (none of it forensic) in this crime. No one should have been executed with on this sort of evidence.
Jummy: statements by me about the blood are a joke? I think you must be reading-comprehension-challenged. That was a statement by the court in Judge Moore’s report on the 2010 hearing. I will quote it again in case you missed it the first and second times (and pay particular attention to the last sentence):
Don Carlos: by the way, if you’re still reading a shell this: a casing matching Davis’s weapon was not found at the murder scene.
The casing evidence consisted of shell casings found at the first shooting of the evening (Cloverdale party), which the prosecution tried to match to a single shell casing found by “a homeless man” at the site of MacPhail’s murder, or near it. The evidence was introduced for the part of Davis’s trial involving the Cloverdale shooting, not the MacPhail killing. An expert said they were probably fired from the same gun, but he was not certain. After appeals, the district court (Judge Moore) considered new evidence that they did not match, but said it wasn’t important because at the original trial the casings evidence had only been used regarding the Cloverdale shooting anyway, so the casings evidence had had no particular impact on whether Davis was guilty of MacPhail’s murder (see Moore’s ruling, beginning on p 99 of Part II).
In any event, you are incorrect when you say the casings evidence was tied to the gun Davis had pled guilty to possessing a year before the murder. The casings were not tied to any gun Davis ever possessed. Nor was the murder weapon ever found. And, funny thing, Coles was on record as carrying a .38 that night too, which was somehow never found!
In fact, quite a few people in the crowd were packing that night.
Troy Davis was a bad guy he most likely is the killer.
Evidence did not add up to make a conviction leading to a death sentence (ie; Casey Anthony and O.J.) the law did not make it’s case “beyond a reasonable doubt” there was and is doubt. Troy Davis even red handed (red shorts?) caught should not have been convicted on the evidence presented.
QUERY: .38 caliber? was the weapon an automatic pistol? Who unloads empties fired from his “revolver” at the scene of the shooting/murder, revolvers do not eject cases automatically.
What a goat screw!