Georgia on my mind.

One of my check list features for an oppressive state is the presence of the death penalty.

Indeed it is hard to think of a closed society without that ultimate sanction at its disposal.

China has their “death vans”; appallingly redolent of the early days of the Holocaust.

The theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran hangs poor wretches in public for crimes as heinous as being homosexual.

There is no way that the USA could be so characterised as a closed, undemocratic society.

It is in many ways the land of the free. The constitution of the United Sates of America remains, in my opinion, the finest political document in human history. It understands human frailties and builds in checks and balances to counteract them.

However, there is the issue of America’s largely colour coded death rows.

Condoleezza Rice spoke of the race issue being “America’s birth defect.”

The founding fathers of Thomas Jefferson’s “infant empire” were white men, many of them slave owners. The first line of the US constitution really should have read “we the WHITE people.”

The sociological data for black males in the USA paints a fairly grim picture.

It is in the operation of the courts where that birth defect can still be seen to have some traction.

The case of the late Troy Davis is not atypical of a criminal justice system where it is very dangerous to be a black male.

White women are occasionally executed (e.g. Karla Fay Tucker), but the chances of the death sentence being commuted to a term of imprisonment is far higher than for a black man.

Also the time spent on death row by condemned prisoners can be longer than a life sentence in other democracies.

Troy Davis had been on death row since 1991.

He had endured three execution dates being set before the fourth, fatal one yesterday.

The lethal injection was, in effect, death by general anaesethic

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/01/AR2010050103190.html

“First do no harm!”

Quite…

Of course the key issue for any state that employs judicial killing is that of miscarriages of justice.

I do not know if Troy Davis was guilty of murder.

There was new DNA evidence and eye witness testimonies throwing doubt, reasonable doubt, on his guilt.

However I am as convinced as I can be that the people who put him to death weren’t sure of his guilt either.

What I AM sure of is that the state of Georgia killed Troy Davis even as they knew the world was watching.

That’s why Georgia should be on your mind.