Comdemed Prisoner Troy Davis's final fuck you

[Fittisize]

Was he innocent? I don't know - probably, yeah. Most likely he most definitely was, but we don't know for sure. But what we do know for certain is that Davis' guilt was in no way assured beyond a reasonable doubt. Perhaps at the time he was convicted in his original trial this may have appeared to be so, but given the actual facts that we learned about the case and the events that transpired afterwards, it's obvious that a big, big mistake was made. This is utterly criminal and it's simply unconscionable that he was executed given the incredible doubt surrounding the case. I understand that the death penalty is a state's rights issue and that the federal government cannot intervene on matters relating to state issues. I say bollocks. I don't care that the founding fathers felt that granting more powers to the states was the best way to protect individual liberties. This execution extends far beyond Georgia. What kind of country lets this happen to one of its own citizens? What kind of country permits and condones states to carry out such a fallacy of a trial and then allows it to carry out a final, irreversible act against somebody who may have been innocent? One commentator described the death penalty as "a barbaric hangover from an Old Testament morality." I tend to agree with that. The rest of the Western world abolished the pre-meditated systematic killing of its own people long ago. This case attracted significant attention all over the globe and today America faces the scorn and disgust of the rest of the world. Within its own boarders all those who fought for Troy Davis and who spoke out against his execution - millions of Americans, I don't doubt, and some of them very influential and well-known people - must live with the shame of what they as a collective allowed to happen. Troy Davis won't be forgotten. Like Cameron Todd Willingham, he stands as a martyr in a struggle to finally end such a brutal, tyrannical, irreversible mode of punishment which could possibly result in the execution of an innocent person.

Having said that, in what I think is a thought-provoking coincidence, Lawrence Brewer, who participated in one of the most heinous hate crimes that I've ever heard of (the murder of James Byrd) was also executed yesterday in Texas. Oh well. Complicated stuff, capital punishment.