Troy Davis execution temporarly delayed by Supreme court

I'v been looking all over ATS for a thread on this but I can't find anything:

The execution of Troy Davis was delayed temporarily by the US supreme court on Wednesday night, in a dramatic intervention just as he was due to be put to death by lethal injection

www.guardian.co.uk...

This is the fundamental problem I have with the death penalty. It's built upon the legal declaration of somebody's guilt, it is not always a certainty of that guilt. Many innocent men and women have suffered at the hands of the death penalty. Apparently in somebody's twisted world, we can dictate that we cannot touch life when it comes to a woman's womb, but when it comes to somebody being legally guilty, even in the case that there is still uncertainty, somehow, some magical authority from God himself makes the case of taking life an exception.

reply to post by Southern Guardian


When you consider how many people have been freed from death row across the nation in the last ten years, because of DNA evidence, the practice should be halted as its fundamentally flawed. Killing one innocent person is one too many.

Excellent news.

Glad to hear he's gotten a reprieve. What a sad story it was turning out to be.

That's good to hear. It seems it would be the wrong move considering the people that stood behind him.

Good news only if he didn't commit the crime, but whose to say?

reply to post by Southern Guardian


I believe he is innocent....and I hope someone will listen within the legal system....real proof is brought forth....and he is set free.

I cannot speak for the victims of the crimes committed by criminals, horrible unspeakable crimes. I am of the personal opinion though that putting even a convicted and certain criminal to death is not true justice. Killing them in my opinion gives them the easy way out, and it's also committing the very same act we demonize them for. Killing them is more of an easy route as opposed to spending having them spend their lives thinking about what they did in prison. From what I understand as well, the death penalty does not come cheap. It cost California $4 billion alone over a period of 33 years so far:

Taxpayers have spent $4 billion since 1978 on California's capital punishment system -- and with only 13 executions to show for it.

That's about $308 million per execution.

And without substantial changes, the state's total bill will expand to $9 billion by 2030

money.cnn.com...

So putting aside the risk of the innocent being convicted of these crimes and their lives been taken, there are many other aspects that go against maintaining the death penalty. In my opinion, criminals who have been convicted with certainty, should work to pay back to society for the rest of their lives as well. Prisons should go through more reform to pay back to the community, to society... To some extent many prisons do this, but overall a system still needs to be developed.

Originally posted by Southern Guardian
So putting aside the risk of the innocent being convicted of these crimes and their lives been taken, there are many other aspects that go against maintaining the death penalty. In my opinion, criminals who have been convicted with certainty, should work to pay back to society for the rest of their lives as well. Prisons should go through more reform to pay back to the community, to society... To some extent many prisons do this, but overall a system still needs to be developed.

I have issues with using Our inmates as slaves. They are not there to be Our workforce. They are there to (hopefully) learn better behavior. And, too, You have issues with innocents being inducted into slave labor.

No... I just can't justify making People slaves because They landed in prison (which about half of are cannabis users).

Growing up decades ago, I often heard the phrase, "Lock him up and throw away the key." That seemed to satisfy society's need to remove certain criminals from society forever. Other criminals could be returned to society, either "rehabilitated" or having served their penalty, but certain crimes called for life in prison without possibility of parole.

I don't know at what point we started to decide that execution needed to be done to act as a deterrent. If capital punishment was supposed to be a deterrent, then it has failed. Cap pun instead has come close to a bloodsport for some or has been made to serve as revenge or closure for a victim's family.

Since both society and the victims now need the criminal to die in order to move on, the focus turns onto the criminal rather than the victims and society.

And we have indeed had to devise more and more legalities to define who will die. A few people I have known confessed to me how at one time they were big supporters of the death penalty, until a family member got caught up in a death penalty case, Then they saw the shortcomings of the justice system and now no longer support cap pun.

Personally, if for no other reason than an innocent person could be put to death, I cannot support cap pun. Lock him up and throw away the key.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether their should be a death penalty, may I ask you to consider a column written by that inflammatory young woman, Ann Coulter? Certainly, I know about her and biases but she introduces some claims of facts that I've not seen anywhere else.

If you would be so kind, glance through her article and ask yourself "If the factual statements she makes are true, does that change my opinion?' For now I'm assuming they're true.

Coulter article on Davis

After a two-week trial with 34 witnesses for the state and six witnesses for the defense, the jury of seven blacks and five whites took less than two hours to convict Davis of Officer Mark MacPhail's murder, as well as various other crimes. Two days later, the jury sentenced Davis to death.

Three recantations were from friends of Davis, making minor or completely unbelievable modifications to their trial testimony. For example, one said he was no longer sure he saw Davis shoot the cop, even though he was five feet away at the time. His remaining testimony still implicated Davis.

Only two of the seven alleged "recantations" (out of 34 witnesses) actually recanted anything of value -- and those two affidavits were discounted by the court because Davis refused to allow the affiants to testify at the post-trial evidentiary hearing, even though one was seated right outside the courtroom, waiting to appear.

The court specifically warned Davis that his refusal to call his only two genuinely recanting witnesses would make their affidavits worthless. But Davis still refused to call them -- suggesting, as the court said, that their lawyer-drafted affidavits would not have held up under cross-examination.

Looks like it's still going to happen

US Supreme Court refuses to block execution

whelp they got him =/ may he R.I.P.

news.blogs.cnn.com... e-appeal-to-stay-troy-davis-execution/?hpt=hp_t1

reply to post by Southern Guardian


SG, I think we finally found something to agree on.

I took a communications class in college. My end of semester project was a five minute speach on the death penalty. I started with the premise of supporting capital punishment by debunking the arguments against it. By the time I got around to making the presentation I was so firmly against capital punishment in the vast majority of cases that I could not argue on the supporting side.

The sad truth is that your race and economics have more to do with you getting the death penalty than anything. A system that so arbitrarily decides life and death has no place in civilized culture. I pray that Troy Davis can find peace in the next life, if he is innocent. I hope the ones that execute him suffer their conscience for their actions.

Originally posted by Southern Guardian
I'v been looking all over ATS for a thread on this but I can't find anything:

The execution of Troy Davis was delayed temporarily by the US supreme court on Wednesday night, in a dramatic intervention just as he was due to be put to death by lethal injection

www.guardian.co.uk...

This is the fundamental problem I have with the death penalty. It's built upon the legal declaration of somebody's guilt, it is not always a certainty of that guilt. Many innocent men and women have suffered at the hands of the death penalty. Apparently in somebody's twisted world, we can dictate that we cannot touch life when it comes to a woman's womb, but when it comes to somebody being legally guilty, even in the case that there is still uncertainty, somehow, some magical authority from God himself makes the case of taking life an exception.

I agree that the death penalty is barbaric and serves as little to no deterrent to crime. It is satisfying for the victims as an act of revenge but when I see the Lock-Up episodes where the victims parents forgive the killer and see the cathartic healing this promotes I think we might learn something if we just tried another way. And this is not even to mention and does not take into consideration the possibility for making a mistake. THAT we should all die for because as a society collectively, we permit it.

The death penalty is good to have for the most henous of crimes......until an innocent person receives the lethal injection......then that becomes murder in my books.

We are lucky to hear of some cases where a person has been proven innocent AFTER the justice system failed in their duty of care and put an innocent person to death.....but how many more have we not heard about?

Should afew innocent people put to death be outweighed by the greater "good" of having the death penalty?

I don't think the USA has the maturity of such a great burden of having the death penalty and the responsibility that goes along with it.

you guys kill me, -34-!- witnesses? 34? That he shot a cop in cold blood TWENTY years ago. I am for the death penalty in this case.

You have to understand that, in order to be sentenced to the death penalty in the US, A jury of, what, 12 people, the judge, the prosecutor, bailiffs, plus all of the witnesses in the court are more than likely convinced of the accused's actions and believe that he or she is guilty. This guy hung around for twenty years with different judges and the supreme court, and politicians and such mostly all convinced that he should die and no commutation. this murderer had plenty of time to prove his innocence.

Tory Davis, I hope you have a better chance in the next life.

Note to those against the death penalty, make the criminals stop killing and then I will help make the state stop.

Originally posted by rbnhd76
Note to those against the death penalty, make the criminals stop killing and then I will help make the state stop.

So, this particular case aside...what about those that are innocent but still are convicted? We all know that innocent men have been convicted of crimes and then later exhonerated. Your stance doesn't take those into consideration. Does that not matter?

Abrihetx,

I hope you don't mind my jumping into your conversation with rbnhd76, but you've offered a question which may be worth discussing at some length.

You ask about those convicted, although innocent. I think your objection is to the system which can find an innocent person guilty. I'm not trying to be flip, but what system should we have that we don't have now? If new evidence turns up that shows that a man is really guilty when he was originally found innocent, should we have a second trial? As it is, new evidence can release a man, but can't imprison a man already tried.

How do we create a system that doesn't make mistakes? We can't. Yet, there must be a system for defining guilt and innocence. Do you have a system significantly different from the current one in mind? I'm assuming that you're basically OK with the current sytem, and only object to the use of death as a punishment option.

Am I correct so far?

Charles1952