The title was a rhetorical question. On the night of September 21st, 2011 we were all Troy Davis. The justice system has failed us all, and it will continue to in the foreseeable future—unless we enact change.
Don’t worry, the irony of me writing an article about how our justice system has failed only one issue after I wrote about its success in the Casey Anthony verdict hasn’t been spared on me. But with dozens of American citizens being executed by our own government each year, I cannot overemphasize the importance of examining the grave injustice of Troy Davis’ fate as a prime example of the inherent wrongness of the death penalty.
Troy Davis was a young black man accused of killing the killing of Mark McPhail, a security guard, on August 29th, 1989. His trial would begin in 1991, with the prosecution presenting a case made almost exclusively of eyewitness testimony. Among the 34 witnesses they would call to the stand, nine would testify that they had seen Troy Davis shoot McPhail. However, over the course of the next two decades, seven of those nine witnesses would change or recant the testimony they swore to in their original affidavits. In fact, several would go as far to claim that they had been coerced by the police into implicating Davis as the shooter.
Even more disturbingly, a later review of the case would bar evidence of the confession of Sylvester Coles as the real shooter. The fact that several of the original eye witnesses changed their testimony to now implicate Coles was similarly ignored.
The idea that Troy Davis wasn’t granted the right to another trial, in a time of forensic advancement and more importantly, a much finer grasp on the legal burden of the prosecution to prove a defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (I.E. Casey Anthony) is disturbing enough in and of itself. However, this article, and much of the controversy over his execution, isn’t really about Troy Davis. At the heart of the matter lies a question that has been asked since the beginning of judicial organization.
Is capital punishment a financially responsible, legally coherent, and societally moral way of punishing those convicted of crimes?
I would argue that to claim that capital punishment comes even close to reconciling with any of those three parameters of judgment would be a euphemism. To evade the necessary moral boundaries of a society, and pursue the legal murder of those who we allege to plague our society is barbaric and fundamentally flawed.
In the context of murder, and the murder of the murderer, the fiscal irresponsibility of capital punish is certainly a minor aspect of the argument against it—but not one to be disregarded. Until recently, one of the firmest arguments for the employment of capital punishment was that it would save the nation money to simply execute those found guilty of society’s most heinous crimes, rather than spending money keeping them alive. In a debate with one who knows anything about capital punishment, you won’t hear this argument used anymore, simply because it has been proven untrue repeatedly. In fact, on average it costs an extra $90,000 per year per inmate to punish them with capital punishment, as opposed to life without parole. California spends an estimated $137 million annually on pursuing the death penalty—now imagine that multiplied by all fifty states.
Furthermore, when examining the financial aspects of the death penalty it is important to take into account the fairness of the defendant’s representation. On average, it costs over $620,000 for one to defend a federal case in which the prosecution is pursuing the death penalty, eight times more than it costs to defend a charge in which the prosecution isn’t. Not only is this a debilitating amount to request of almost anybody to pay, but there is a blatant class inequality in whether or not you will be put to death. A government report found that those who paid over $320,000 for their attorneys had a 19% chance of being given the death penalty in a trial in which it was being pursued. On the other hand, those who paid under $320,000 for the necessary legal defense team had a 44% chance of being given the death penalty.
When I said that we are all Troy Davis, I meant it. It is anyone of us who could next find ourselves the victim of a system with vast socio-economic inequalities.
It has been the recently adopted argument of those who support capital punishment—and 60% of Americans still do—that execution is a way to quell the emotional burdens of the victim’s family. However, as I highlighted in my ardent defense of Casey Anthony’s verdict on legal grounds, emotion has no place in the workings of the justice system. By this, I don’t believe I am discounting the importance of emotion, but emotion simply cannot pervade our senses when making the decisions that hold other’s lives in jeopardy. Emotions blind us. Emotions guide us to the most likely suspect. Emotions compel us to feel assured of one’s guilty, simply because that sense of knowing is comforting. Emotion, and the subsequent prejudicing perception, has no place in the decision of one’s life. For that reason, the input of the victim’s family be disregarded in the decision as to whether to pursue the death penalty. Just as well, emotional closure should also be disavowed as an argument for why we should execute those on death row.
Furthermore, one can see an immense amount of legal incoherence in regard to what capital punishment ultimately does. When it’s all said and done, capital punishment acts as a legal process to finalize the abolishment of a prisoner’s chance at legal appeals or advanced and exculpatory evidence. A prime example of advanced forensics saving a multitude of lives is Barry Scheck’s Innocence Program. The Innocence Project, a program that uses perpetually advancing forensic and DNA evidence as a means of proving death row inmates innocent, has exonerated over 217 convictions of those on death row in the past 16 years—ultimately saving their lives. But those were the lucky ones, and with attempts to quicken the appeals process many more will be executed before new forensics methods can be created, or essential evidence reexamined. Not only will many more die before the likes of the Innocence Program can examine their case, but there have been thousands of innocents prisoners who have already died because of a system that demands their death before methods of proving their innocence can intervene or be invented.
Finally, even those of us unconcerned with the legal or financial flaws of capital punishment should have a grasp on the moral recklessness of murdering our own citizens. To begin with, I thought it had been long establish that “An eye for an eye will make the world go blind.” It absolutely astounds me that we live in a country with a Christian majority in the population, yet the majority (remember, 60% of Americans support capital punishment) of us find little concern with the vengeful ideology of “an eye for an eye” in practice through capital punishment—the exact moral philosophy of the Old Testament that Jesus preached against.
Furthermore, we must ask ourselves; does the state have the right to murder its own citizens? I would argue that it does not, and that no matter how heinous ones crime, everyone has an entitlement to life. In addition, while I certainly don’t condone any kind of violent crime, I believe there is an element of victimization in any criminal. If we are to assume that people are not born destined to be killers or rapists, than we must deduce that something in their life—whether something in their parenting, circumstances, mental stability, surroundings, ideological brainwashing, or socio-economic status—made them a victim of life’s cruel misfortunes. Something warped them to the point that they were able to willingly commit a crime punishable by death. While I’m certainly not claiming they didn’t have a freedom of choice in that particular scenario, there are just some decisions that a fair or sane minded person wouldn’t make. Something happened to them; something made them a victim.
For that reason, I believe it is essential, no matter the assurance of their guilty, to focus on the rehabilitation of felons rather than the cruel and utterly meaningless destruction of their lives. Rather than spend $90,000 a year on a prisoner to fight the legal boundaries of capital punishment, our justice system should provide strong and reliable counseling to these people. Rather than injecting a concoction of venoms into their veins, erasing the last hopes of their rehabilitation; we need to inject a system of support and understanding into their minds. One that forces them to grasp what they have done, come to terms with it, and understand what they did was wrong. If years of detrimental surroundings could brainwash one to murder, years of professional rehabilitation could make them come to terms with what they did, and understand its wrongness. This vision of a system free of capital punishment, and with focus on rehabilitation rather than meaningless punishment, is one of a economically sustainable, legally fair, and morally admirable justice system.
To create such a justice system is to reinforce the foundation of a civil society.
