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PAGE TITLE: The New York Times
ARTICLE TITLE: Justice After Troy
Davis
DATE: Saturday 24
September 2011
AUTHOR: Ross Douthat
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Ross Gregory Douthat (pronounced /ˈdaʊθət/;
born November 28, 1979) is a conservative American author, blogger and New
York Times columnist. He was a senior editor at The Atlantic and wrote Bad Religion: How We Became a
Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012), Grand New Party (Doubleday,
2008) with Reihan Salam, and Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the
Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005). David Brooks called Grand New Party
the "best single roadmap of where the Republican Party should and is
likely to head." Douthat is a film critic for National Review and
has also contributed to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,
The Weekly Standard, the Claremont Review of Books, GQ, Slate,
and other publications. In addition, he frequently appears on the video debate
site Bloggingheads.tv. In April 2009, he became an online and op-ed columnist
for The New York Times, replacing Bill Kristol as a conservative voice
on the Times editorial page. Douthat is the youngest regular op-ed writer
in the paper's history. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/rossdouthat/index.html?inline=nyt-per
 |
| Ross Douthat |
September 24, 2011
Justice After Troy Davis
By ROSS DOUTHAT
IT’S
easy to see why the case of Troy Davis, the Georgia man executed last week for
the 1989 killing of an off-duty police officer, became a cause célèbre for
death penalty opponents. Davis was identified as the shooter by witnesses who
later claimed to have been coerced by investigators. He was prosecuted and
convicted based on the same dubious eyewitness testimony, rather than forensic
evidence. And his appeals process managed to be ponderously slow without
delivering anything like certainty: it took the courts 20 years to say a final
no to the second trial that Davis may well have deserved.
For
many observers, the lesson of this case is simple: We need to abolish the death
penalty outright. The argument that capital punishment is inherently immoral
has long been a losing one in American politics. But in the age of DNA evidence
and endless media excavations, the argument that courts and juries are just too
fallible to be trusted with matters of life and death may prove more effective.
If
capital punishment disappears in the United States, it won’t be because voters
and politicians no longer want to execute the guilty. It will be because
they’re afraid of executing the innocent.
This
is a healthy fear for a society to have. But there’s a danger here for
advocates of criminal justice reform. After all, in a world without the death
penalty, Davis probably wouldn’t have been retried or exonerated. His appeals
would still have been denied, he would have spent the rest of his life in
prison, and far fewer people would have known or cared about his fate.
Instead,
he received a level of legal assistance, media attention and activist support
that few convicts can ever hope for. And his case became an example of how the
very finality of the death penalty can focus the public’s attention on issues
that many Americans prefer to ignore: the overzealousness of cops and
prosecutors, the limits of the appeals process and the ugly conditions faced by
many of the more than two million Americans currently behind bars.
Simply
throwing up our hands and eliminating executions entirely, by contrast, could
prove to be a form of moral evasion — a way to console ourselves with the
knowledge that no innocents are ever executed, even as more pervasive abuses go
unchecked. We should want a judicial system that we can trust with matters of
life and death, and that can stand up to the kind of public scrutiny that
Davis’s case received. And gradually reforming the death penalty — imposing it
in fewer situations and with more safeguards, which other defendants could
benefit from as well — might do more than outright abolition to address the
larger problems with crime and punishment in America.
This
point was made well last week by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing
for The American Scene. In any penal system, he pointed out, but especially
in our own — which can be brutal,
overcrowded, rife with rape and other forms of violence — a lifelong prison
sentence can prove more cruel and unusual than a speedy execution. And a
society that supposedly values liberty as much or more than life itself hasn’t
necessarily become more civilized if it preserves its convicts’ lives while
consistently violating their rights and dignity. It’s just become better at
self-deception about what’s really going on.
Fundamentally, most Americans who support the death penalty do so
because they want to believe that our justice system is just, and not merely a
mechanism for quarantining the dangerous in order to keep the law-abiding safe.
The case for executing murderers is a case for proportionality in punishment:
for sentences that fit the crime, and penalties that close the circle.
Instead of dismissing this point of view as backward and barbaric,
criminal justice reformers should try to harness it, by pointing out that too
often our punishments don’t fit the crime — that sentences for many drug crimes
are disproportionate to the offenses, for instance, or that rape and sexual assault have become an implicit
part of many prison terms. Americans should be urged to support penal reform
not in spite of their belief that some murderers deserve execution, in other
words, but because of it — because both are attempts to ensure that accused
criminals receive their just deserts.
Abolishing capital punishment in a kind of despair over its
fallibility would send a very different message. It would tell the public that
our laws and courts and juries are fundamentally incapable of delivering what
most Americans consider genuine justice. It could encourage a more cynical and
utilitarian view of why police forces and prisons exist, and what moral
standards we should hold them to. And while it would put an end to wrongful
executions, it might well lead to more overall injustice.
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