An interesting column from that hotbed of antis, the UK.
American Way: The shallow antiAmericanism of the 'I am Troy
Davis' crowdDavis' crowd
There are few subjects that provoke as much smug ondescension and shallow anti-Americanism as the death penalty in the United States.And the “debate” over the execution in Georgia last Wednesday of Troy Davis, 42, convicted of the 1989 murder of Mark MacPhail, an off-dutypolice officer, marked a new low.
The sheer emotionalism and partisanship of much of the coverage of the case in Britain was an embarrassment. On virtually no other subject could you find facts presented so selectively, conclusions so sweeping and reasoning so simplistic.
American campaigners against the death penalty know the buttons to press. Thus, we have statements like that from Thomas Ruffin, a lawyer for Davis, who said that Georgia had “legally lynched a brave, a good and indeed, an innocent man”.
We saw “I am Troy Davis” T-shirts being worn as far afield as London, the message being that Davis was somehow plucked randomly from the streets and arbitrarily condemned, perhaps because he was black.
Unfortunately, little about the Davis case fits this naïve picture. A jury of seven blacks and five whites found that Davis, who had a street name of “Rah”, standing for “Rough As Hell”, had been pistol-whipping a
homeless man in a Burger King car park and had shot MacPhail dead when he intervened.
Again and again, courts confirmed the Davis conviction as being on legally solid ground. Lynchings were carried out by racist mobs rushing to judgement, dragging their quarry out to string them up from a tree. To describe a two-decade legal process that twice went to the highest court in
the land as a “lynching” is to try to strip the word of all meaning.
Last year, the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of directing that a District Judge scrutinise hold fresh hearings because seven out of nine eyewitnesses had supposedly recanted their testimony. Davis’s lawyers declined to put two of those witnesses on the stand,
making their affidavits of almost no value. Judge William Moore, a President Bill Clinton appointee, found that of the five others, two did not in fact alter their original evidence and two lacked any credibility. He found that one, a jailhouse snitch, had genuinely recanted – but that it had been clear in the original trial he was a liar.
Judge Moore concluded in his 174-page ruling that the “fresh” evidence Davis had gathered amounted to little more than “smoke and mirrors” and the “vast majority of the evidence at trial remains intact”.
Indeed, a reading of his judgement indicates that by not calling two of its recantation witnesses (one was waiting in the courthouse to testify and the recantation witnesses (one was waiting in the courthouse to testify and the other, the homeless man who was beaten, was readily available), the Davis defence team was preserving something they knew would damage his case in court if tested but if left intact could be of publicity value. There has never been a scintilla of evidence that Davis's race has ever been a factor in his initial conviction or in it being upheld.
The current Supreme Court contains four liberal judges, none of whom issued a dissent in the Davis case. Two of them were appointed by Mr Obama who, incidentally, supports the death penalty himself and declined to make any statement about the execution. Another justice, Clarence Thomas, is a black man from Georgia.
Not all American states have the death penalty on the statute book and many of those who do choose not to carry out executions. In recent years, the Supreme Court has ruled that the mentally retarded or those under 18 when their crime was committed cannot be put to death. Executions in the US are rare and declining – 42 were put to death in 2010 and 36 so far this year. Two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty, a similar number to those in Britain. Which, as James Taranto has argued, runs counter to lazy bracketing of the US with authoritarian regimes: in fact, the US has the death penalty because it is not authoritarian.
My own opposition to the death penalty is principally because of the grotesque circus that the whole execution process has become. It has the effect of elevating the murderer and diminishing the victim – the solemn recording of the last words of condemned men, the details of the final meal, the letters received from women around the world (a schoolfriend of mine from Stockport writes to a Death Row inmate in Texas).
I wonder, too, whether all this just makes the agony of victims’ relatives more acute. The actor Alec Baldwin used the Davis case to attack themore acute. The actor Alec Baldwin used the Davis case to attack the MacPhails, stating on Twitter: “Wonder if the McPhail [sic] family will seek death penalty for US leaders who killed thousands of US soldiers and countless innocent Iraqis."
Most Americans were unmoved by the slick publicity campaign surrounding the Davis case, preferring to rely on the sober assessments of the courts rather than the likes of Alec Baldwin, the European Union (who one might have thought would have had other things to worry about) and
people campaigning via Twitter.
If anything, the moral superiority of so many pontificating about Davis and the presumption of Europeans telling Americans how to run their justice system makes it more rather than less likely that executions will remain part of the American way