Troy Davis, The Sanctity of Life & The Racism Card

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism

The macabre count down to an execution is always a horrible affair—for all except a few sorts like Ann Coulter. She has never encountered a country she didn’t think the US should level, or an execution not worth carrying out. The commutation of the death sentence of Troy Davis (who has since been executed) seemed eminently reasonable to me (who supports the death penalty) in light of the fact that, according to reports, the Davis sentenced was based on eye-witness testimony, which is always iffy. (Surprisingly, Chris Matthews covered the case well, looking at all angles and evidence.)

The assertions of “racism,” however, are as despicable as Coulter’s prod to kill.

I am so sick of people (many of them in the liberty camp) who think their moral status is elevated by fingering others as racists. Cut that crap already. As one of my readers pointed out, on the very same day that Davis was scheduled to die a white man “was headed to the death chamber … for the infamous dragging death 13 years ago of James Byrd Jr., a black man from Jasper in East Texas.”

Argue on the merits of a case, don’t make amorphous, feel-good charges of racism.

I agree with BARRY SCHECK, who raised a reasonable case for commutation:

…at the Innocence Project, we have over 275 people who were
exonerated with post-conviction DNA evidence. And, remember, DNA evidence
is only present in less than 5 percent of criminal cases. So, what about
all the other ones where there may be eyewitness misidentification, perhaps
as happened in the Troy Davis case or bad forensic evidence that we know
definitely happened in the Troy Davis case?

It’s futile to remind Republicans like Coulter that commutation is not exoneration. Republicans generally confine their appreciation for the sanctity of life to fussing over fetuses; about fully formed human-beings they don’t care as much.

Moron’s Ideas for ‘Living Within Our Means’

Barack Obama, Business, Capitalism, Debt, Economy, Inflation

On Monday, Sept. 19, BHO published the grandiosely titled “Living Within Our Means and Investing in Our Future: The President’s Plan for Economic Growth and deficit Reduction.” As promised after the address given to the join session a week or so earlier, this thing is supposed to explain how BHO intends to pay for his latest plan to squander an additional $447 billion without adding a cent to the 14.7 trillion-dollar debt.

Things are bad when BHO media loyalists like The Economist are unimpressed:

Sadly, the details of Mr Obama’s plan do not live up to the promising goals. On spending it relies too much on one-off cuts to the military and a laundry list of untried and controversial trims to mandatory programmes and on taxes, a frustratingly vague tax plan that sacrifices meaningful reform to the more symbolic goal of raising taxes on the rich.

This from page 2:

“The American Jobs Act would cut payroll taxes in half to 3.1 percent up to their first $5 million in wages, providing broad tax relief to all businesses but targeting it to the 98 percent of firms with wages below this level, and it would completely eliminate payroll taxes next year for any business that increases its payroll by hiring new workers or increasing wages for existing workers. The Act would also extend 100 percent expensing through 2012, allowing all firms—small and large—to take an immediate tax deduction on investments in new plants and equipment.”

This kind of incentivization is grounded in BHO’s perception of business owners as tempestuous twits—kids who need candy to make them grow their livelihood.

If consumers were flush with cash to spend, business would expand to meet the demand. Business is behaving prudently, because that’s what the market demands. If anything, a tough economy would indeed force increases in productivity: fewer and fewer workers are doing more and more of work.

The Palestinian Authority May Face ‘Death by Recognition’

BAB's A List, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The PA may well come to regret invoking the Kosovo precedent, says Nebojsa Malic:

THE EFFORTS OF THE Palestine Authority (PA) to declare independence and get UN recognition have been compared to those of the “Republic of Kosovo,” a province of Serbia occupied by NATO in 1999 on behalf of the ethnic Albanian “Kosovo Liberation Army.” The KLA, a terrorist organization dabbling in drug-running, slavery and other unsavory practices on the side, orchestrated NATO’s aerial campaign and subsequent invasion (much like the current “rebels” in Libya), and after almost nine years of ethnically cleansing the province and laying the groundwork, declared it an independent state in 2008. While “Kosovo” is recognized by around 80 governments (most notably the US and major Western European powers), it has yet to claim a seat at the UN, faced with a certain Russian and probable Chinese veto.

Last year, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, not to be confused with faux tribunals such as the ICTY and ICTR) turned in a stunning verdict, refusing to recognize that the KLA government’s declaration directly violated the UN resolution regulating the status of Kosovo and accepted international law. Torturing language and logic, the majority of judges said that the declaration had been made not by the UN-regulated provisional government, but the “direct representatives of the Kosovo people,” and as such not bound by UN resolutions or international law (!). Following this sort of logic, any group, anywhere, could declare statehood – and the only thing that mattered would be whether it has sufficiently powerful patrons to enforce that statehood by force.

Upon recognizing “Kosovo,” its U.S. and EU sponsors insisted it would not establish any sort of precedent, as fervently as they had once insisted that the occupation of the province in no way conflicted with Serbia’s sovereignty over it. And now the PA is about to exploit the very Kosovo precedent. Critics of the American Empire often deride Washington’s belief in American exceptionalism, but it does actually apply in one, albeit unintended, respect: the U.S. may well be the first country in history to destroy the very international order its global dominance was built upon. Flouting the law with impunity is one thing; declaring that behavior to be the law, quite another.

However, there are drawbacks to PA’s invocation of the Kosovo precedent. For one, it would undermine “Kosovo” itself, obliterating a major argument of the separatists’ sponsors and putting the rest of the world on notice regarding their own separatist issues (and many countries have them). With many already uneasy about the professional revolutionaries (a method of unconventional takeover first tested in Serbia) in their midst, now another legacy of the Euro-American Balkans interventions – death by recognition – threatens to go global. While few seem to be aware of these potential problems down the road – there appears to be near-universal support in the UN for a state of Palestine – they will most certainly read their heads sooner or later.

Arabs themselves may be ill-served by the declaration. The PA is not self-sustaining, while the economic activity in the territories in question leans heavily on Israel. However much of a nuisance navigating the security checkpoints may be now, becoming an international border won’t make them any better – quite the contrary. Statehood would also mean taking ownership and responsibility for one’s actions and behavior, including terrorist attacks; until now, everything that happened could be blamed – and usually is – on Israel and the occupation. With statehood, that excuse disappears.

Claiming a Palestinian state in the territories of West Bank and Gaza would also go against the charters of both Fatah (current PA leadership) and Hamas. Both deny Israel’s right to exist and claim the entire territory of the old Palestine Mandate as their own. Settling for territories annexed by Egypt and Jordan in 1948, and occupied by Israel in 1967, is not just a matter of quantity, but of principle: it is an indirect recognition of Israel’s legitimacy. Last, but not least, the existence of a Palestinian state would shift the dynamic of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the current field of 4th-generation warfare (where weakness is strength) that has benefited the Arabs to a more conventional model, where Israel has proven its superiority repeatedly (as the Egyptians who remember 1967 and even 1973 can attest).

****
Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

UPDATE I: Commute The Troy Davis Death Sentence

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Courts

If it hasn’t yet, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, reconsidering the death sentence of Troy Davis, ought to consult Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus. According to Dr. Loftus’ seminal work, eye-witness testimony is terribly unreliable.

A man should not be put to death based solely on the testimony of eye-witnesses most of whom have since recanted.

Troy Anthony Davis (born October 9, 1968) was convicted of the August 19, 1989, murder of Savannah, Georgia police officer Mark MacPhail. MacPhail was working as a security guard at a restaurant when he intervened in an argument between several men in a nearby parking lot. He was shot in the heart and face without having drawn his gun. One of the men, Sylvester “Redd” Coles, went to police and implicated Davis in the killing, and Davis was arrested four days later. During Davis’ 1991 trial, many witnesses testified they had seen Davis shoot MacPhail. Two others testified that Davis had confessed the murder to them. The murder weapon was never found, and no physical evidence linked Davis to the crime. Throughout his trial and subsequent appeals, Davis has maintained his innocence. Davis was convicted and sentenced to death in August 1991.

(I discovered the work of this leading world authority on memory in the late 1990s, when I was writing and raging about the the recovered memory ruse. I also heard Dr. Loftus testify in court thereby securing a man’s liberty. As is obvious from the prominence of characters like Drs. Phil and Drew Pinsky, the profession of psychology is festooned with popularizers, poor thinkers and plain charlatans. Elizabeth F. Loftus has always stood apart.)

On the other hand, Joshua Komisarjevsky needs killing.

He and his accomplice, Steven Hayes (already waiting to die), were arrested at the scene of the crime—the Petit family home in Cheshire, Connecticut. He and Hayes had just killed all three—and raped two—of the women of the Petit family. They then proceeded to burn down the house.

UPDATE I (Sept. 20): “Breaking News vial Amnesty International: The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency to Troy Davis on Tuesday. This means that very little is standing in the way of the state executing a potentially innocent man this Wednesday.” Amnesty International is “calling on the Board to reconsider its decision, and on the Chatham County (Savannah) District Attorney Larry Chisolm to do the right thing.”