Troy Davis and the state of American justice | Megan Carpentier

How to account for the failure of public outcry to stay Davis’s execution? In short, people in Georgia support the death penalty On Wednesday, Troy Davis became the 33rd person executed in the United States in 2011 (and there are nine remaining executions scheduled for this year that have not been stayed, as of publication time ). But with with the exception of Humberto Leal , nearly all those other men went to their deaths with little public outcry. Not so Davis, whose execution had been stayed twice previously and whose conviction even sent back to the state court for review by the US supreme court. But a state judge ruled the conviction valid, a third stay was denied and a state body in Georgia denied clemency this week – despite a vast outcry in the US and from abroad. Beyond all standard legal options, Davis’s supporters – including Amnesty International – began a public, viral campaign to encourage the local prosecutor and local judge to withdraw the execution order. Though Davis was convicted in a court of law, seven eyewitnesses have since recanted or contradicted their testimony , with some saying they were pressured by the police; jurors in the case say they wouldn’t vote to convict him if he had been tried today. But it was all for naught: it usually takes extraordinary circumstances and new evidence that decisively rules out the person convicted – as the 17 former death row inmates exonerated by DNA know too well – to convince almost anyone of a convicted criminal’s innocence. And sometimes, even then, prosecutors, judges and politicians still choose to find such evidence less than compelling. The US legal system offers defendants the presumption of innocence before conviction. Post-conviction, though, the legal presumption is that the 12 citizen jurors made the correct decision and that the defense lawyers and prosecutors did their jobs honestly and to the best of their abilities – a reasonable theory, but unable to account for the 273 people exonerated (some posthumously) thanks to the efforts of the Innocence Project . What justice campaigners and death penalty abolitionists don’t fully appreciate, perhaps, is the extent to which executions are a state matter, decided by state courts and judiciaries, with juries reflecting attitudes that pertain to that state. While 60 people sit on federal death row (and the federal government has only executed three people – all during the second Bush adminstration – since the supreme court decided it was legal in 1976), the vast majority of the nearly 3,300 people currently on death row in America were convicted in state and local courtrooms. And studies show that the people who make up the juries in those states overwhelmingly support the death penalty. That is, of course, a key feature of the American legal system: as with its political system, those powers not explicitly held by the federal government are left to the states – including the power to determine and prosecute most crimes. So, in the 34 states that have the death penalty , crimes that might net only life imprisonment in another state carry the risk of death. In California, which has death penalty statutes on the books and the greatest number of prisoners with death sentences, but which has only executed 13 people since 1976, those convicted of heinous crimes might face the ultimate sentence but are generally secure in the knowledge that they’ll likely never face the ultimate punishment. While the death penalty enjoys broad support in public polls, those same polls reveal that, like its application, support for the punishment varies regionally, with residents in liberal, coastal states less inclined to use it or support it than their southern or midwestern counterparts. While the calls for Troy Davis’s reprieve poured into Georgia from all over the country, and the world, the likelihood is that a minority of those callers spoke with a Georgia accent – a fact that, for a local prosecutor, a local judge and a state-selected board, probably mattered more than the most famous named person who picked up the phone today. All politics, it’s said, is local … and so is most crime and punishment in the United States, for better or, for many today, for worse. Troy Davis Capital punishment State of Georgia United States Amnesty International US supreme court Megan Carpentier guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 22, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.