In The News - August

The Supreme Court of the United States has ordered an evidentiary hearing should take place in light of new evidence, a decision that has been without precedent in 50 years. The pleas of Georgian death row inmate, Troy Anthony Davis, have not gone unheard around the world. He was convicted of killing an off duty Savannah police officer in 1989. He claims that almost all of the witnesses in his trial have since recanted their testimony and that the key witness is the shooter himself. However, this has not been a serious consideration in any of the appeal circuit courts due to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act which was instituted to streamline the death penalty. This ensures that the federal courts consider appeals based on constitutional grounds, and not factual or evidentiary grounds.

It’s unlikely that in the long term this decision will have any serious impact on the operation of the death penalty, but it certainly puts the question up in the air, and the more the waters are muddied, the more doubt that is put in the minds of America’s constituents, the better. This case also goes to show just how much power a collective of voices can have in seeing justice done. Troy Davis will now have the evidence against him properly reconsidered which is, at the barest minimum, justice. Whether or not his conviction is upheld remains to be seen. Should he be found innocent, I would expect the reverberations from such a decision to shake the very foundations of the death penalty in the United States. Here is a man, on death row 20+ years, having come close to execution numerous times, his call for a re-trial consistently ignored and finally found to be innocent.

This is such a endemic problem with the death penalty. Executing somebody demands even the most callous of people to be completely sure of their guilt. This is exactly why there are 11-13 stages of appeal for someone sentenced to death in the US. The problem I perceive, however, is the fact that the system needs to be “expedited” in the first place. Imprisonment isn’t a sentence that needs to be “hurried along”. It is a sentence than can be quickly reversed and easily maintained throughout a trial and all subsequent appeals. The death penalty needs to rush through countless appeals so that the actual sentence can then be carried through, after which, it is utterly irreversible.

"A state supreme court, a state board of pardons and paroles and a federal court of appeals have all considered the evidence Davis now presents and found it lacking”

In typical ultra-conservative fashion, Scalia has thrown out all reason and common sense by defending the decision of the previous federal court judges. To blindly put your trust in the functioning of the judiciary despite overwhelming evidence that the system is not working. Scalia is essentially denying that anybody could fall through the cracks and that the system could accidentally execute an innocent man. He seems to go as far as to suggest that if the state did execute an innocent man, because he was found guilty and that was upheld at every level of jurisdiction, the execution was “legal” despite innocence. Does he even realise that as the highest court in the U.S. it is his role to be a guardian of justice. Instead he seems to prefer turning a blind eye to the fact that perhaps capital punishment is not entirely infallible.

There’s no point dwelling on the ultra-conservative minority in this decision, especially when the split was 7/2. Justice Stevens summed it up well:

"Imagine a petitioner in Davis' situation who possesses new evidence conclusively and definitively proving, beyond any scintilla of doubt, that he is an innocent man. The dissent's reasoning would allow such a petitioner to be put to death nonetheless. The court correctly refuses to endorse such reasoning."

I’ll keenly await the outcome of Troy Davis’ evidentiary hearing.

______________________________________

Another big development has been a case which, about 2 years ago, I totally failed to put up on this blog, although I was aware of it. About 2 months before I arrived in the U.S. for my Reprieve internship, Michael Wayne Richard was executed while his lawyers scrambled to submit a motion for a stay of execution in order to lodge an appeal. Judge Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, ordered the court closed at 5pm, against normal policy when an execution is about to occur.

It’s incredible to think that a judge who deals with cases and sentences that involve the execution of a person could be so capricious and heartless to take actions that would block this mans life from being spared. In truth, however, it’s not so hard to understand. When you have been dealing with state sanctioned murder so intimately and for so long, a form of brutalisation must occur. Seeing brutal murderers come and go, churned out by the implacable ritual that is capital punishment must be utterly soul destroying, especially when you take an active and complicit involvement in it. To Sharon Keller, execution must seem not only normal, but a huge inconvenience on her life, one which can be brushed aside effortlessly with a simple act of bureaucracy that screams of vindictiveness on a Machiavellian scale.

Thankfully, although massively delayed (2 years), she now stands trial for her acts. I would say that she should be held criminally liable for the death of this man, but I understand that it would be obtuse to suggest that a member of the judiciary could be held criminally responsible for a decision made within her official duties as a judge. That would completely compromise the independence and impartiality of the judiciary (which is already questionable in the United States).

I hope that the truth comes out in this trial and that the outcome does some small amount of justice to a man who was wrongfully executed.