The death penalty: Was an innocent man executed?

“A person’s last words carry a certain power,” said the Chicago Sun-Times in an editorial. So it had to be deeply disturbing to anyone with a conscience when Troy Davis used his final breath last week to declare, “I am innocent....May God have mercy on your souls.” Moments later, prison guards in Georgia started the flow of lethal toxins into his bloodstream, and a long legal battle was over. Davis was executed for the 1989 shooting of an off-duty policeman, Mark MacPhail, who had intervened in a parking-lot brawl. No physical evidence ever linked Davis to the crime, and seven of the nine eyewitnesses whose testimony convicted him later recanted, with some claiming police had pressured them to lie. The sheer flimsiness of the case against Davis created “staggering levels of public interest,” said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com, with personal appeals for clemency from Pope Benedict XVI, former FBI head William Sessions, and 1 million people who signed a petition. There are many good reasons for the U.S. to join most of the Western world in abolishing the death penalty, but Davis’s execution provides the most compelling reason of all: How can we ever know, with 100 percent certainty, that we’re not killing an innocent man? This is “the beginning of the end of capital punishment in America.”

It shouldn’t be, said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com. Here’s why: On the very same day that Davis was put to death, the state of Texas executed Lawrence Brewer, “one of the racist goons’’ who tied James Byrd, a black man, to the back of their truck and dragged him to death in 1998. Unlike Davis, Brewer—who covered his body with KKK symbols and burning crosses—boasted of his involvement in the gruesome murder, and even said, “I’d do it all over again.” Brewer “deserved to be executed”; a penalty of death is the only appropriate societal response to cold-blooded or mass murder. Now, if Davis turns out to be innocent, “that will be a heart-wrenching revelation.” But it just means that the death penalty should be applied in only the most egregious and indisputable cases.

Nearly two thirds of the American public wants to keep the penalty on the books, according to polls, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. Why? Because people “want to believe our criminal justice system is just, and not merely a mechanism for quarantining the dangerous in order to keep the law-abiding safe.” To scrap the death penalty “in a kind of despair” over the system’s fallibility would be to accept that our society lacks a reliable mechanism for determining the guilt of defendants. Instead of trying to eliminate a form of justice the public wants, reformers should put their energy into improving the judicial system and its standards of evidence, and putting an end to wrongful convictions.

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No reform can eliminate the possibility of wrongful conviction, said Steve Kornacki in Salon.com. In recent decades, DNA evidence has exonerated 17 people who’d been convicted and sentenced to die. We now know just how imperfect our system of “justice’’ can be, and how disproportionately it’s applied to black men convicted of killing whites. That’s why four states have scrapped capital punishment in recent years. Sadly, though, this is a nation with a history of vigilante justice, and “the basic eye-for-an-eye nature of the death penalty remains compelling for most Americans.” We’ve seen other prisoners of dubious guilt, like Troy Davis, executed before, “and it will probably take a lot more of them before Americans ever give up on the death penalty.”