At the start of Year 12 I embarked on my Extended Project and after deciding to do it on the death penalty my natural step for the next two years was to regularly check the Amnesty international 'death penalty' section on their website as often as I'd check my Facebook notifications.
In this time Amnesty have covered many cases of supposed 'injustice'. I followed their updates on Khristian Oliver, a man convicted almost entirely because at his trial the jury were passed Biblical passages condoning death as retributive action until he was executed in November 2009. Fast forward two years and I've completed my Extended Project and am staunchly anti-death penalty. I oppose it morally, financially and practically. And for the past two years I've been following the case of Troy Davis, a man who has spent the past 19 years of his life on death row for a crime he still maintains he did not commit.
One of the most emotive anti-death penalty arguments is always going to be that hypothetical innocent man executed. But that innocent man is not hypothetical; he is real. This isn't even a case of being against the death penalty as a form of punishment, it's a simple case of injustice. But when capital punishment is involved, that injustice is maximised to the point where come Wednesday an innocent man is going to die at the self-righteous hands of the law.
During my project I've read letters that Troy has written to Amnesty international thanking them for the support he's been given. T-shirts have been produced with the writing 'I am Troy Davis' and masks worn to symbolise the communal and global injustice that is felt at one man's sentence in the state of Georgia, USA. I've seen pictures of campaigners who have visited him and the 560,000 signatures on petitions to commute his death sentence to a life sentence. When I finished my essay on capital punishment, I wrote of how he was undergoing a last ditch appeal to the Supreme Court, generally considered as the last hope in the long-winded stretch of appeals processes for those sentenced to death in the USA. I wrote that in June 2010 Troy had been 'given an opportunity to present new evidence that could prove his innocence' at a hearing in Savannah, Georgia. I wrote that despite persisting doubts that Troy did not commit the crime for which he is set to lose his life, he is still currently on track for execution.
He was convicted solely on the fact that 9 witnesses told a court of law that they had seen him murder police officer Mark MacPhail but 7 of these witnesses have since gone on to retract their testimony, with 'several citing police coercion'. There is no physical evidence linking him to the crime and of the two witnesses who have not retracted their statement, one was an original suspect, with other witnesses claiming it was he who murdered MacPhail. I had a project on the death penalty which spread over 2 years of my life but Troy has a sentence of the death penalty which has already lasted him 19 years of his, before it inevitably takes it away.
One of the arguments in my project against the death penalty was that those convicted essentially serve two sentences; a life imprisonment, followed by an execution. I considered it a breach of human rights to essentially trick justice into giving a man two sentences, when the average time spent on death row in the USA is over 10 years. People spend longer than 20 years there, losing their will to live before it's taken away from them anyway. I've read essays on the 'death row phenomenon' where the awful physical conditions of death row combined with the mental torment of knowing that they're in death's waiting room have caused severe psychological and physical trauma to those sentenced to death. But Troy wants to live. He's battled through all of this and despite the slow death of justice, his will to live struggles onward.
Thousands came out and protested around the world last night against his sentence. Marching to let a man keep his life knowing that justice has been twisted and shaped into a noose. But regardless of how you feel about retribution, how you feel about taking someone's life as a punishment, this is not justice. This is carnage masquerading as justice. This is, to sum everything up, a man who is most likely innocent being killed at the hands of the law. He might be guilty. He might be lying, but there's too much doubt. All the evidence that convicted him in his original trial all that time ago has since disappeared and countering evidence has come to light. His conviction has lost all credibility and the world is about to see what happens when a real miscarriage of justice takes place.
It's not too late. Amnesty international is doing what it can in a last ditch attempt to save the life of an innocent man. This isn’t happening in the ‘third world’; this isn’t happening somewhere obscure where media coverage is lacking. This is happening in the west’s back garden.
Troy is sentenced to be executed on Wednesday 21st September. His lawyers are fighting and his supporters are fighting. You’re not fighting against justice; you’re fighting for it. Pledge your support for Troy Davis and help save someone’s life today.
Cases like this (and there are quite a few), don't so much undermine the argument for the death penalty as, well, electrocute it for five minutes in a specially constructed chair.
ReplyDeleteIn theory, killing very naughty people isn't such a bad idea, and occasionally an individual comes along (Ian Brady springs to mind in this country), whose continued life simply serves no purpose. Indeed, Brady has in recent years repeatedly expressed a wish to be allowed/assisted to die, and it seems perverse to me that we continue to pay for him to be fed, clothed and housed against his will.
I agree that the risk of the state bumping off innocent people alone is so unpalatable as to render capital punishment unworkable. I also feel pretty uneasy about certain members of a society being empowered to decide whether someone should live or die. On the other hand, in circumstances where a convicted murderer is given a whole life tariff, I don't think I'd mind if they were also given the option to be executed instead. An innocent person would presumably always choose prison and the opportunity to appeal and clear their name. Someone who acknowledges their guilt, and sees no future other than decades spent rotting in a prison cell, may take the other option, and save us all a few hundred thousand quid into the bargain.
What say you?
Yeah, I understand your point. I think the trouble is that it withdraws from the absoluteness of the law, in my mind. Maybe I'm just being picky, because ultimately I am just entirely against the death penalty, or indeed the state taking an individual's life in any case.
ReplyDeleteI think it's a really dangerous precedent to set if the state does gain power over life in such a literal sense. I wrote a 9,000 word essay on the death penalty so I'm pretty solid in my opinion against its existence entirely by now, but if you're really interested in the death penalty conundrum as it were, I could certainly email it to you.
For instance, interestingly, the death penalty by almost all accounts costs considerably more than life imprisonment. A lot of this is naturally down to the inefficiency of the systems where it's in place (like the US) or indeed the appeals processes which are necessary to include any kind of humanity in the existence of capital punishment, but it is still an interesting statistic.
They killed him then. Sorry for your loss.
ReplyDeleteCouple more points (which no doubt you at least touched on in 9,000 words, but what the hey):
The UK is better at this stuff than the US. We'd hardly ever execute anyone, and I think we'd make fewer mistakes. Back when we did hang people, they had one appeal, and spent a matter of weeks in the condemned cell, which presumably covers off the cost argument, and the one about being on death row for a decade being tantamount to a second punishment.
Which kinda links to the second point - for a lot of people, knowing that you'll spend the rest of your life in prison, and die there at the end of it, is actually a crueller punishment than the relative relief/mercy of death.
Like I said, I'm in the 'no' camp too. But there are some strong arguments in both camps.
I'd be honoured to read the essay - bung it across: tempestuousness@hotmail.co.uk