Next Wednesday, Troy Davis may die. An African-American man convicted of killing a Savannah, Georgia, police officer in 1989, Davis is the latest face at the center of the death penalty debate. The operative word here is "may." A petition of over 663,000 names, mine among them, has been presented to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. The petition calls on the five member board, which will meet Monday to decide Davis' fate, to set aside his death sentence. A simple majority is all that's required for the thumbs up, or down.
Controversy surrounds Davis' conviction. Since the trial, seven of nine witnesses have either recanted or altered their sworn testimony. And Davis has never faltered in his claim of innocence. Given these circumstances, the Georgia Board should commute the sentence. In the face of such uncertainty, caution should prevail, the benefit of doubt given to the condemned.
In all cases, I am opposed to the death penalty. I prefer the sentence of life in prison, without parole. It allows for a bit off leeway in what is, at very best, a system of justice that is imperfect, subject to error. From time to time, we screw up. The prisoner can be released. The dead, whether innocent or guilty, remain forever in the grave.
David R. Dow, founder of the Texas Innocence Project, provides names and faces and stories of justice gone awry. There's Francis Newton, executed for killing her two children and husband; without getting a drop of blood or gunpowder residue on herself. Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in 2004, for killing his three children by setting the house on fire. Problem is, four national arson experts reviewed the case, each concluding the fire was accidental. There's Anthony Graves, released after fourteen years on death row, exonerated in 2010. We could go on. But even a single case makes the point.
Certainty is rarely, if ever, possible. DNA? Very useful, to be sure, both in exonerating the wrongly convicted and in convicting the rightly accused. Infallible evidence? Not so fast there. Evidence is gathered by often careful but sometimes careless investigators, processed by usually exacting but sometimes overly fatigued lab technicians. Maybe an inadvertent mistake was made.
Hubris. Any arrogance that refuses to admit the possibility of error is a dangerous thing. Pride goeth before a wrongful execution.When asked in Wednesday night's Republican debate whether he struggled with the possibility that an innocent person had been executed on his watch, candidate and Governor of Texas Rick Perry answered, "Ive never struggled with that at all."
234 executions and counting on his watch; that's some sense of certainty there, Governor. Are you sure a bit of caution might not be a good idea? I mean, the odds alone should give a thinking individual pause. But better not to waver. The Presidency is at stake. And that's what bothers me.
I'm not for coddling violent criminals. I read of crimes so heinous that I give thanks my guns are behind lock and key. At the news of such horrors, I find within myself a rage that would, given the proper time and circumstance, compel me to drop the hammer on the perpetrator myself. Lock and key provide just enough delay to allow more sane thoughts to regain their appropriate place in my psyche.
That pause for reflection is what a justice system is supposed to provide, lest we confuse our concern for justice with our thirst, understandable at times, for revenge.
I hope the Georgia Board will decide in favor of Troy Davis. No criminal conviction should ever be chiseled in stone. Better to write in pencil. That makes it easier to go back and correct our mistakes.
The Jawbone
