Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued a stay of execution for Troy Davis, a convicted cop-killer on Georgia's death row.
It had originally planned to consider Davis' appeal for a retrial on Sept. 29, but called an emergency session after the Supreme Court of Georgia -- as well as its board of pardons -- refused to move Davis' Sept. 23 execution date. Those of you scratching your heads are thinking rather than reading, a skill which will serve you well as we peer briefly down the rabbit hole.
Capital punishment is an arbitrary wonderland; it is the sole area of our justice system where punishment is based on desert (we do not steal from thieves, for example), as well as an unquestionable black hole for public funds despite life imprisonment being significantly cheaper for the state. You could say the death penalty deters crime, but to do so you have to ignore the overwhelming inconclusiveness of statistical data. You could also argue that executing monsters is necessary in the pursuit of justice, but sometimes prosecutors find a human instead of a monster and are forced to improvise. Painting the roses red, as it were.
But to properly savor the insanity of the Troy Davis case, it is helpful to examine Georgia's long battle with the Supreme Court. In 1972, the court ruled 5-4 in Furman v. Georgia that the imposition of the death penalty was too arbitrary under the existing statutes of a number of states, with justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan going further and declaring the death penalty unconstitutional. Four years later the court reversed itself, consolidating five cases under Gregg v. Georgia, upholding the constitutionality of the death penalty by a 7-2 margin, and establishing Georgia's guided discretionary laws as a model for the rest of the union. Guided discretion is the separation of capital cases into trial and sentencing stages. The theory was that by having juries recommend a sentence after they have declared a capital offender guilty, you remove all bias and random factors from death penalty cases, forever. This golden age of Henry Fonda-esque nobility on the part of juries barely lasted a decade.
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