Others have been victims of the process as well (example: not filing the right forms at the right time). In July of this year, Ronald Kitchen was the 20th Illinois death row inmate of 224 to be exonerated since 1977. That’s a 9% error rate. Kitchen was also a victim of the process until common sense ultimately prevailed.

http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2009/07/13/ronald-kitchen-the-latest-death-row-exoneree/

I’ll have to get into the eye witness testimony problem later…

I see nothing here about letting criminals roam free, but rather should the state have the power to execute? Perhaps if the government didn’t spend so much time “creating” criminals they would have more resources available to devote to finding out the truth of the matter.

The justice system has never been perfect; it is in the hands of human beings. Many criminals go unpunished, and some noncriminals are punished. Would you prefer that we simply give up and ignore crime and say that anything goes? Or perhaps we could give a suspended sentence for every crime? At some point we are going to get to the point that we cannot afford to house all the criminals we are developing with our lax attitudes towards crime, so we need to decide how we will deal with this abundance of criminals we are creating.

With regard to the unreliability of eye witnesses, that is easily solved. Just ban all eye witness testimony. It will seem a little bit strange, but no stranger than the rest of what you seem to be thinking.

Whether the witnesses were lying (or mistaken) then or are lying (or mistaken) now, either way this casts serious doubts on their testimonies.

I also don’t think that putting a halt to the process of putting Troy Davis to death undermines the criminal justice system (which is already very much broken). At the very least Davis’ execution should not occur until a thorough investigation into why these individuals changed their stories has taken place. IMO, Davis should receive a new trial without these witnesses. As I have pointed out in previous posts, eye witness testimony is statistically unreliable to begin with.

But Scalia and Thomas don’t seem to be concerned about whether Davis is guilty or not; they have become slaves to the legal process and have tossed common sense out the window.

Alan M. Dershowitz made a very good observation in response to Scalia and Thomas’ dissent:

Let us be clear precisely what this means. If a defendant were convicted, after a constitutionally unflawed trial, of murdering his wife, and then came to the Supreme Court with his very much alive wife at his side, and sought a new trial based on newly discovered evidence (namely that his wife was alive), these two justices would tell him, in effect: “Look, your wife may be alive as a matter of fact, but as a matter of constitutional law, she’s dead, and as for you, Mr. Innocent Defendant, you’re dead, too, since there is no constitutional right not to be executed merely because you’re innocent.”

We have to remember that there is much more to this question than a legal process/principle here. This is a man’s life we are talking about.

This is why I am adamantly opposed to the death penalty: what happens when the state is wrong? Are you okay with the idea of the state killing an innocent person?

I know that I’m not.

If a system, as you persuade in your argument, can by its intrinsic design put an innocent man to death, then, sir, it is a system that is overdue to be undermined.

Yes, they can. The state has been given that power. According to Scalia and Thomas, it would seem, but according to the law and the constitution they have told no untruth.

I don’t know if I could separate them into good guys and bad guys. It’s more like those that tend to read what the law says and those that read what the law doesn’t say.

Why did this case have to go to SCOTUS? I believe it’s because prosecutors, the courts, and government officials in general do not like to admit to making mistakes or believe in making corrections whenever mistakes are uncovered (WMD in Iraq anyone?).

Troy Davis may well have shot that police officer BUT if the state cannot prove it then he needs to be let go. When 7 witnesses change their stories then IMO, it’s time for a new trial.

And I would agree with you, he did not have a fair trial if false evidence was used against him.