The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is today considering what to do, if anything, regarding the case of Troy Davis, and may issue its decision today, tomorrow, or some think most likely, on Monday, June 29.
As you know, Troy Davis was convicted of murdering a Georgia police officer in 1991. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted or contradicted their testimony. These seven witnesses must be heard in a new evidentiary hearing. Read an Amnesty International report about this case here.
If you have not yet signed the on-line petition at www.iamtroy.com, please do so now, as these petitions will be printed and hand delivered on Monday morning.
Here's the other thing you can do right now to help save Troy's life:
Please call Georgia's Chatham County District Attorney Larry Chisolm at 912-652-7308 and ask that he reopen Troy's case.
If you are a Georgia or Chatham County resident, please identify yourself on the call as a concerned resident. However, you do NOT need to be a Georgia resident to make the call! We want DA Chisolm to know that Troy has massive support across the country, so make the call yourself, and then please forward this widely and ask everyone you know to make this call.
If there is one phone call you make today, please make it to Larry Chisolm's office.
It's getting down to the wire. This may be the one call you make that can actually save a man's life. 912-652-7308. Please call now.
Some of my friends keep pointing out that I seem to be on the side of criminals and against the law abiding. To a certain extent that's true. It works like this. Law enforcement personnel and others in authority should be held to a higher standard, in my opinion. When they abuse their power, in addition to whatever legal or moral crimes may be involved, they're violating the public trust. To me, that's important.
Criminals on the other hand, especially addicted and abused ones, are already operating with two strikes against them. In many cases they're just trying to survive. There's no need to be excessively severe with people like this, except where public safety is at stake. We lose nothing by applying to them the same rules of presumed innocence that everyone's entitled to.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
OK, now we're getting somewhere--an admission on your part of a blatant double standard, as part of, apparently, some idea of "social justice," or something, on your part. Seems a little weird to me, but whatever. My main problem is that you take it to the point of using a different definition of "murder," depending on who pulls the trigger. I'd encountered the term "moral relavitism" before, but you, in defining crimes differently for different people, take it to an extreme I never considered possible.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if that's quite what I do, but I definitely don't think these cases are simple black and white deals. I'm always looking for mitigating circumstances as a way of understanding how people can do the things they do.
ReplyDeleteCops have to be above this. They have to be able to resist the temptation to abuse their power.