The execution of Troy Davis

[Flagg]

Flagg: Fuck you. Go stand in the rain and grow mold.

You couldn't fuck me if you paid me. And I'd rather be moldy and wet than a racist cunt like you. Go hug a rich white douche.

[Alkaloid]

So now we have to use the shit vets use to put down dogs and cats

Sorry, is there some reason that we have to use random shit grabbed from a vets supply closet rather than using a drug we already know kills people painlessly and is, I dunno, meant to be used on people? Say, a morphine drip that we increase until he dies, maybe? Just spitballing here, but we wouldn't want him to suffer or anything would we...

[ChaserGrey]

There had been reports of the SC issuing a "hold" or similar order a few minutes before the event. This has now apparently being shown to not be the case.

The talk at the time had been that even if the SC had done such a thing that Georgia could choose to ignore it.

Given the sequence of events, it was reported for a time that this had occurred.

Ah, I see. Withdrawn, then.

Once the SC declines to review the case that's pretty much it- there are no "holds" after that, and the Justices know it. I suspect that's part of why they took three hours to decide. They knew damn well that if they declined the case that was it for Troy Davis. We'll likely never know the details, though, unless it comes up in somebody's memoirs. For good reasons the SC is very closemouthed about its deliberations.

[Count Chocula]

Alkaloid,

Morphine actually wouldn't be a bad choice. That's how the hospital euthanized my grandfather a few years ago...just increased the drip until his bodily functions ceased. Of course, he had been in a coma for over a week so he didn't exactly fight the drug. Maybe the medical folks here could chime in, but I'm guessing morphine would take longer or do a worse job immobilizing the condemned than pentothal. But that's just a guess.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Well, its nice to actually know you're a racist with a hard on for killing black folks rather than having to suspect it.

Show something to prove I'm a racist or shut the fuck up, you pigsucker newbie. All the countervailing evidence (witness recantation) was HEARSAY. That's not evidence. Bob Barr saying it was fucked up was HEARSAY. Desmond Tutu or a rapper or Amnesty International saying Davis was innocent IS NOT EVIDENCE. Do you see the trend, tadpole? The Georgia and US Supreme Court judges who reviewed his case multiple times spent a lot more time and effort on the case that we ever will arguing over it here.

Oh, in case I forgot to say it: fuck off.

Guess what? We don't kill every murderer. Why did Troy Davis get the shot when 95% of the time a guy whipping out a gun in the middle of a fight and popping a cap in someone's ass and killing the guy results in a 25-year sentence for 2nd degree murder? What's different about his case? Oh yeah, Davis was a black man and the victim was a white cop. I don't care whether or not he was guilty, it was racist and stupid to execute him for the crime that happened regardless. Saying Clarence Thomas approves of something, btw, is basically proof it's racist against black people.

P.S. the other problem I have with it is my ethical objection to lethal injection entirely, but that's neither here nor there.

[weemadando]

People can have manic and euphoric reactions to it at common painkiller doses. Higher doses I'm not sure, but unconsciousness is pretty much a given.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Keep on hating, wee man. This case had a lot of judicial review. The allegations of coercion were not proven. The US Supreme Court declined to judge the case. Clarence Thomas, black SC juror, didn't think the man was innocent. Oh snap! Could it be that the preponderance of evidence and judicial review reached the conclusion that Troy Davis murdered a policeman had nothing to do with his race? Fuck you. Show some love and go hug an aborigine.

Even if the allegations of coercion were not proven: THE WITNESSES CLAIMED THEY LIED UNDER OATH WHEN GIVING THEIR TESTIMONY. If they say "Yeah... I lied" guess what, then you have no god damn evidence from their testimony. In fact, there should be NO WAY IN HELL to execute someone on the basis of eyewitness testimony, precisely because people DO lie, and do in fact have shit memories.

There was no forensic evidence at all. The only reason to have the guy imprisoned, let alone killed at this point is either "racism" or "cover our ass and never admit to making a mistake" neither of which are good reasons to murder an innocent person.

Additionally, our judicial appeal process is shit. It can only question matters of law, not of fact, unless entirely new evidence is discovered post trial (and even then, it is dicey). So saying that appeals were exhausted really says very little about a persons guilt.

You want to know why Illinois does not have the death penalty anymore? Because an independent audit found that some 50% of their death row inmates were probably innocent. Illinois has a much better justice system than Georgia. How much do you want to bet that the numbers in Georgia are much worse?

[Alkaloid]

All the countervailing evidence (witness recantation) was HEARSAY. That's not evidence.

True enough. And had they been placed under oath again and made the same statements in court that they did originally, you might have a point. But just because a statement wasn't made under oath doesn't mean its not true, and the fact that at no stage during the appeals process were these people who were claiming that 1. they were witnesses to the crime and 2. they gave false statements in the first place, placed under oath again so that they could recant the statement given earlier if they wanted to is ridiculous.

Show something to prove I'm a racist or shut the fuck up

Implying that the only reason anyone would be angry about this is because they have some desire to hug minority groups is pretty fucking insensitive at best, dude. Not necessarily racist. My apologies.

[Flagg]

Implying that the only reason anyone would be angry about this is because they have some desire to hug minority groups is pretty fucking insensitive at best, dude. Not necessarily racist. My apologies.

No, it's pretty much racist.

[TithonusSyndrome]

The worst part is that Georgia has no access to sodium penethol -- there is no longer a US supplier of the drug. So, Georgia has fallen back on the similar sounding drug used for Animal Euthanasia.

Troy Davis was killed with a drug not labeled for human consumption, a drug that does not work the same on a human. It is also quite possible the doctors are not administering the new drug in proper doses, as no one has really tested the animal drug to see if it would kill humans.

I consider that Cruel and Unusual Punishment.

Knowing that the American legal landscape is as convoluted and dense as it is, what with all the laws being passed to represent monied interests without any thought as to whether or not the same law could possibly be wielded against a (different) monied interest in the future - is there any possibility that using an unfit chemical agent to execute a prisoner could possibly result in some kind of legal action against the state that would serve the cause of abolishing this kind of bullshit in the future? I'm thinking something like how Al Capone was brought down on tax evasion charges despite being an open murderer, that breed of creative but beneficial legalism.

[Phantasee]

I learned today that Virginia and Texas have executed more black men than the other 48 states combined. What's up with that?

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

I learned today that Virginia and Texas have executed more black men than the other 48 states combined. What's up with that?

I think that you and I both know the answer to that perfectly well.

[Thanas]

I am with Duchess and Ando on this.

One more example why the US justice system is fundamentally flawed.

[Surlethe]

Comment vaguely directed at the sentiments expressed by Thanas and Ando: You know, the more I learn about history, the more I wonder why people in other countries ever thought the US was some shining beacon of hope and democracy. Were you guys naive enough to buy our national myth before now?

Because, I mean, this is progress. Hundred fifty years ago, Davis would have been someone's property. Eighty years ago, the folks in his county would have hung him from a tree and had a barbeque. Fifty years ago, the federal GI bill included provisions where the presence of a black person living in a neighborhood halved property values and effectively forbade black veterans from getting housing loans. Forty years ago, Martin Luther King took the civil rights movement to Chicago to try to get the Chicago suburbs to enforce anti-discrimination laws, and was driven out of town by white suburbanites in counterprotests more vicious than anything he'd seen in the deep South. Thirty years ago, Reagan was elected after declaring his campaign in Philadelphia, MI, an obvious symbolic move: just a few years prior, three civil rights activists had been murdered there. I don't believe the case was ever solved. Twenty years ago, some LA cops beat the shit out of a black guy (like they had a habit of doing, apparently) and someone else happened to catch it on tape. LA burned for a few days.

Now? A national advocacy campaign gets a lot of people on board stopping the execution of a likely-innocent man, and the Supreme Court even stays the execution for a few hours while they consider the case (and probably do some political horse-trading).

See why I'm confused that you guys seemed to be disappointed? Why were your expectations high in the first place?

Oh, yeah ...

The only thing shocking about this case is that it didn't take place in Texas.

No, just on the other side of the deep South.

[Thanas]

Comment vaguely directed at the sentiments expressed by Thanas and Ando: You know, the more I learn about history, the more I wonder why people in other countries ever thought the US was some shining beacon of hope and democracy.

Because the US takes every opportunity to remind others that it is. If you are an impressionable child, you tend to believe such things.

I mostly view the US as massive hypocrites on a sale never seen on this earth before since I actually lived in the USA.

[weemadando]

Comment vaguely directed at the sentiments expressed by Thanas and Ando: You know, the more I learn about history, the more I wonder why people in other countries ever thought the US was some shining beacon of hope and democracy.

Because the US takes every opportunity to remind others that it is. If you are an impressionable child, you tend to believe such things.

I mostly view the US as massive hypocrites on a sale never seen on this earth before since I actually lived in the USA.

I bought into a lot of the BS until I really started studying history in a deeper way at age 14 or 15. It kind of coincided with the Pauline Hanson BS in Australia which made me question a lot of my assumptions about the country I lived in too.

And then there was shit like my mother ending up being on blacklists in the US (deny entry, no fly) because she'd been a fairly active anti-Vietnam protester in Australia. At least until she got Canadian papers and just used those instead anytime she wanted to cross the border.

Watching the US shit all over the rest of the world, due process, human rights and international law for the past decade was really just the poop flavoured icing on the rotten cake.

[Irbis]

So some Europeans, being humanitarians, blocked the use of the best, most painless drug available for execution of murderers in the US. So now we have to use the shit vets use to put down dogs and cats. Nice.

Or maybe, just maybe, they don't want to take part in state-organized murder?

Anyway, there had been already one chemical originally intended to use on animals that was used in this role, too. A little something called Cyklon B. And it sounds it was more "humanitarian" than the above one, too. Why your justice system doesn't start using that? After all, it had been "tested" quite throughly and most of the time, the difference in the usage would seem to be a mere question of scale.

[weemadando]

So some Europeans, being humanitarians, blocked the use of the best, most painless drug available for execution of murderers in the US. So now we have to use the shit vets use to put down dogs and cats. Nice.

Or maybe, just maybe, they don't want to take part in state-organized murder?

Anyway, there had been already one chemical originally intended to use on animals that was used in this role, too. A little something called Cyklon B. And it sounds it was more "humanitarian" than the above one, too. Why your justice system doesn't start using that? After all, it had been "tested" quite throughly and most of the time, the difference in the usage would seem to be a mere question of scale.

[Lord Zentei]

Comment vaguely directed at the sentiments expressed by Thanas and Ando: You know, the more I learn about history, the more I wonder why people in other countries ever thought the US was some shining beacon of hope and democracy.

It's probably a combination of its very early history shortly after it gained independence, when it was indeed more progressive and representative than most of the European powers. Also, due to the role it played in the defeat of Fascism in WW2 (without itself being a dictatorship). Since then, it seems to have merely assumed that both of these conditions were natural and intrinsic conditions, and not situational.

[Thanas]

Guys, I know you are all upset and trust me, I am mad as hell as well but let's not get into Nazi territory yet. Chocula and Flagg are already under discussion so let's not add names to that list.

[Surlethe]

In related news, one of those motherfuckers who dragged a black guy to death in Texas a few years back was executed last night. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =140670820

(This post will test whether the revulsion in this thread is at a perceived miscarriage of justice or at the US institution of the death penalty.)

[Eternal_Freedom]

I wonder how many citizens/subjects/etc of other nations will recognize the degree to which the citizens of the United States had functionally zero impact on this issue.

I don't wish to comment about the main article, but I did have a thought about this part from a post on page one. Surely this is a good thing? I mean, do you really want a justice system that can be swayed by public opinion? I always thought that was the point of the courts, to decide matters in a setting not fuelled by pubilic anger or outrage.

[weemadando]

I'm opposed to the death penalty because no justice system is perfect and there ain't a second go around once you've killed someone.

It's the Troy Davis case that's just particularly disgusting in the way it has been handled. Maybe he was guilty, but as has been shown repeatedly, that was in question and even then the death penalty should probably not have been applied.

That dragging case where there was overwhelming evidence including having the victims blood on them and their clothing? That's about as cut and dried case as you'll likely encounter, but for me, it doesn't make killing the killers any more "right".

[MarshalPurnell]

The Georgia justice system does not, apparently, consider recantations of witnesses to be a "new" evidence factor unless there is some proof not that the witness was lying, but that the testimony the witness presented was physically impossible- IE, that the witness was somewhere else than the crime scene at the time. Thanks to our adversarial court procedure, prosecutors were able to take full advantage to argue that the changes in testimony were irrelevant in a purely legal sense. And to make this situation even more dubious, three out of the seven cases where a death row inmate has been exonerated in Georgia all occurred in Chatham County. Between witness testimony that they were coerced by Redd Coles, the obviously heavy-handed police investigation that occurred after MacPhail's murder, and the disproportionate nature of the charge, it is obvious that the trial was seriously flawed. In any case the balance of evidence does not exclude the possibility that Georgia has executed an innocent man, and that is damning enough for its application in the case.

The death penalty's application in America more broadly is obviously flawed. Racial matters are still pretty decisive when it comes to deciding who is and is not charged with a death penalty offense. Police and prosecutorial misconduct still features in stories of people who wind up exonerated from death row. Now I do not have any moral objection to putting certain people to death for crimes which are particularly heinous and/or which threaten social order in a way that demands examples be made. For example, the perpetrators of the James Byrd lynching, who were clearly established as guilty, probably deserve to be executed and certainly should be executed to send the clearest possible message that racial violence will no longer be tolerated in America. Then one gets to people like Mohammed Atta or Anders Breivik, men who were clearly culpable for terrorist atrocities committed while fully in their right mind, as a matter of conviction; putting them to death is not unwarranted since there are no mitigating factors at all and their actions quite obviously were intended to strike at the heart of a given society.

That said given the inherent flaws in any human institution, it may be better to abolish the death penalty entirely rather than allow for a wide-ranging application of it where politics insure a completely arbitrary application. In any case if it were to be retained in the US the criteria should certainly be stringently codified and tightened up to cover only the most necessary applications and judicial safeguards should be enhanced- and frankly taking it out of the control of states entirely and placing all death penalty crimes under the purview of the Federal government might be the best approach, if quite impossible. If states like Texas and Georgia will abuse the death penalty, and if taking away their ability to do so is constitutionally impossible without abolishing the death penalty entirely, then abolition may be the only feasible way to deal with the abuses. If imposing death ever does become immanently necessary to salvage social order it will only be in the middle of an emergency (such as the aftermath of a major natural disaster or a period of major insurgency/civil war), and summary executions will probably be more needed than trials anyway.

[Todeswind]

I posted this a while back in a different thread but I think it applies to this situation. I hope you don't mind the repost rather than re-writing it.

A great number of wrongful convictions have been made over the USA's history but most of them have been overturned by the appeals process. The vast majority of convictions are not wrongful conviction, that is to say that there is never sufficient evidence to bring about reasonable doubt. Since 1970 have only been 138 people sentenced to death and exonerated for that crime prior to execution, its a matter of debate how many people were wrongfully convicted before the year 1970 but I suspect the number was probably statistically higher for convictions and lower for exonerations. Depending on what source you look at there is credible evidence to suggest that between 5-20 executions since 1970 have been done under questionable circumstances. This is not to say that these people were innocent, only to say that there were circumstances which raise the question of reasonable doubt. There are about five cases quoted as the obvious failures of the system.

The Death penalty information center has a published list of eight people who were killed but "possibly innocent" and another forty or so who are "possibly innocent" and currently in the appeals process. Assuming that they're right and 8 out of 1235 executions since 1976 were questionable that puts the appeals process at about a 99.35% success rate. At a the 99.35% point it becomes more of an academic debate over if a system that kills one innocent man and a hundred cold blooded murders is a fair system and I can understand argument either way.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ex ... ow_inmates