Troy Davis

[desh]

Troy Davis was executed tonight. Many people believe he was innocent. I didn't really want to post about it at all, but I don't see anyone saying what I want to say, and it's kind of gnawing at me, so I don't think I have any other choice.

I think the US should never execute anyone. It's indefensible financially (it's cheaper to keep someone locked up for life), societally (no other first-world country executes anyone), and morally (for a whole host of reasons, including the horrible racial disparities in executions, the fact that we've made mistakes before and will make them again, the fact that revenge is not an appropriate motivation for punishment, and the fact that I simply don't believe we have the right to deliberately kill anyone).

Any argument you want to make along those lines, I fully support. The death penalty is wrong and should be abolished. Full stop.

I don't know if Troy Davis was innocent. You don't know either. Only a very few people know for sure. The best we as a society can do is use some sort of deliberative process to determine our best guess. In this case, that involves evaluating post-conviction recantations in some way.

Most of the people decrying the execution today on the merits (i.e. that Davis was innocent or deserved a new trial, rather than that all executions are wrong) seem to be implying that no one ever took seriously the recantations or other post-conviction evidence. That's not true. A Federal district court did so, and issued an order upholding the execution. It's here: http://multimedia.savannahnow.com/media/pdfs/DavisRuling082410.pdf . I particularly recommend the last 49 pages, starting at page 126, for a detailed analysis of the recantations and other evidence.

Now, I'm not willing to take a federal judge as the final word. I would love to hear someone who has read and digested the above link explain to me why Davis was "innocent enough" to not be convicted by a jury. The judge says there is still no reasonable doubt. I'd love to hear a response to that.

Instead what I'm hearing is people not acknowledging the above order. Most people probably haven't read it. That's fine. It's long. But I still feel like I haven't heard the rest of the conversation, and I'm not able to form a conclusion on Davis without it.

Have you read the order, and do you have a response to it? Or do you have a link to a blog post responding to it? Please, send it my way. Otherwise, I'm going to continue going on being pretty sure Davis deserved his conviction.

Though he didn't deserve to be executed. No one does. Davis was no different.

Comments

[desh]

Where's that? The part that I'm latching onto is on page 166, that "[t]he burden was on Mr. Davis to prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that no reasonable juror would have convicted him in light of the new evidence" (and that he failed to meet that burden). Does he contradict himself, or is he squeezing that "less than ironclad" in through the "clear and convincing" window? Or something else? I'm no lawyer...

[eman]

Footnote 108 on page 171 - "After careful consideration and an in-depth review of twenty years of evidence, the Court is left with the firm conviction that while the State's case may not be ironclad, most reasonable jurors would again vote to convict Mr. Davis of Officer MacPhail's murder."

[desh]

Interesting. Is there any way to read that other than a contradiction? Did he mean "ironclad" to be some standard well beyond "reasonable doubt"? Did he, uh, not realize he wrote "most"?

I'm reading up on Herrera v. Collins, which seems to be the main legal precedent here. O'Connor's concurrence really bothers me. If "the execution of a legally and factually innocent person would be a constitutionally intolerable event", then isn't proof of innocence enough to raise constitutional issues? But then she says that since there are no constitutional issues, they can't reevaluate the conviction.

The more I read about this, the more I think there's something fundamentally wrong with the case law. Which is maybe *more* disturbing than other people think the situation is. I still feel like I'm missing something...

[eman]

I'm not inclined to disagree with you there--it's been far too many years since I sat in a criminal law classroom, and MN (where I got my JD) banned the death penalty in 1911, so we only studied it in the abstract.

But yes, there's a bizarre catch-22, where SCOTUS cannot re-evaluate the guilt or innocence of someone sentenced to death, only whether the courts acted appropriately in doing so (not whether the verdict was appropriate).

Of course, given that it took SCOTUS until 2005 to decide that executing MINORS was cruel and unusual, I have little faith that the court will move with any haste in addressing any of the other inequities surrounding the death penalty.

[eman]

And I would think that "no reasonable juror" is an inappropriate standard - conviction of the death penalty must be unanimous, so if ANY reasonable juror has a doubt (which by the judge's own footnote that is introduced), then the penalty wouldn't be imposed and the defendant would be sentenced to life in prison.