Killing Troy Davis in Georgia, USA

I have always opposed the death penalty for as long as I can remember. Yesterday, the state of Georgia murdered Troy Davis, a 42 year-old African American man, for a crime that he claimed he never committed. Today, I am even more convinced that those countries, lawyers, judges and jail staff who aid and abet state murder, are on the wrong side of the ethical divide. There is no justice served in the wilful and premeditated taking of a human life. There are those who argue that it serves to allay the feelings of the families of the victims, but I seriously doubt that human beings are still so base as to feel vindicated when the government and state machinery kill in their name. Of course, there is evidence to show that people do actually cheer when governments decide to wage wars, or to take the lives of criminals but in both instances, there is no end to the killing. A war does not stop all wars; it merely defers hundreds of other acts of violence for a few hours, days, weeks and months. For every act of war that is waged in the name of righteousness, there will be a hundred more waiting in the name of virtuous retribution. So too with the act of killing persons who have been found guilty of heinous crimes. It does not end crime; it only exacerbates the flaws of a criminal justice system that is unable to address issues of social inequality.
So why is the capital punishment still so compelling in some of the countries that present themselves as champions of human rights and democracy? In the United States of America, this has to do in part with the fact that it is an expensive proposition to enact capital punishment. There is a lot of money to be made in keeping the whole system -- from trial, to conviction, to appeals, to enactment – going. The criminal justice system in the US has been privatised and outsourced to contractors, who make enormous amounts of money to maintain prisons and deal with appeals. Logically, following the money train leads the most amateur of detectives to surmise that these systems operate on the principle of profits. To put this in perspective: the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice announced some startling figures in 2011. Using conservative rough projection costs, it said that the cost of maintaining the death penalty was $ 137 million a year, whereas to maintain the life imprisonment system takes only $11.5 million a year. When private firms are ready to make profits, it is easy to see why there is such a greedy, conniving connection between money and the perpetuation of the death penalty.
Mr. Davis was convicted, many still claim wrongly so, for the fatal shooting of a white off-duty police officer in 1989. His detractors, who are also proponents of the death penalty, claim that there was compelling evidence against him and that his appeal for clemency had been denied several times over. The same people conveniently gloss over the fact that he was convicted on the basis of eyewitness accounts alone and that the forensics data just did not add up. This means that the judicial system has to incorporate something other than just eyewitness accounts in the prosecution of heinous crimes, because these accounts can be driven by biases. Therefore, they require material evidence, which was not forthcoming in this case. To make matters worse, seven of the nine eyewitnesses recanted their statements, saying that they had been wrong. Just seconds before he received the lethal injections that took his life, Mr. Davis told the family of the victim, as well as his family, who were watching the grotesque execution that he was innocent and prayed that they would fight to uncover the truth of who had killed the man more than twenty years ago. The last words of this god-fearing Christian, as he was about to meet his maker, were about his innocence and forgiveness for those who were going to kill him.
In a curious and ironic turn, Iran released two students from Berkeley – Shaun Bauer and Josh Fattal – who were imprisoned for two years in that country. In his first statement to the international press, Mr. Bauer did not forget the larger struggle for freeing political prisoners, especially in Iran and the US. He hoped that these prisoners, and perhaps by extension those on death row, would receive the same sensitivity that he did. I am sure Mr. Bauer is disappointed, as are a million others who hoped that the US would do the right thing and not murder Troy Davis.