Troy Davis - Guilty or Innocent?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Corkey

Guilt or innocent. I don't know and having reasonable doubt he should not be put to death. He should in fact have a new trial.

A lawyer friend of mine says that he'd like to see us change the death penalty in this way. If you are convicted beyond a reasonable doubt then you *can't* get the death penalty. If, on the other hand, you are convicted beyond ANY doubt you can get the death penalty.

So what is beyond any doubt? You are caught, red-handed, with the smoking gun in your hand on CNN or your DNA is all over the crime scene and you are caught on camera. Basically, if someone would have to invent something worthy of a Harry Potter novel in order to plant reasonable doubt in the mind of a juror then if the crime is heinous then that defendant is eligible for the death penalty.

I am not opposed to the death penalty in and of itself. I am opposed to US using the death penalty at this point in our cultural development because we seem to want it too bad. We seem to have no real appreciation--as a culture--for the gravity of the power we have in our hands. When people can cheer a governor who has presided over the death of 234 people in his state in 10 years (that's averaging slightly less than 2 per month) and we know that *at least* one of them was innocent then we have shown ourselves unworthy of the responsibility of administering the death penalty. Only civilized nations should be able to execute criminals and civilized nations recognize two things:

1) Taking the life of a criminal is still taking the life of a human being
2) Better to keep a guilty man in prison for 10 human lifetimes, than it is to take the life of one innocent man.

We do not understand the first and disturbingly large numbers of us disagree with the second.

Cheers
Aj