When the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for Troy Anthony Davis less than two hours before he was scheduled to be put to death, the Associated Press reported that the victim’s family seethed.
With a Supreme Court decision expected tomorrow, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts argues today that sympathy for the family does not by itself lead to justice:
[T]he case against Davis is not exactly airtight. No murder weapon, DNA or other forensic evidence implicated him. He was convicted solely on the testimony of nine witnesses, seven of whom have since recanted. Two of them say police bullied them into fingering Davis. Of the two witnesses who are sticking to their stories, one is a man named Sylvester Coles. Some of the other witnesses now say he’s the one who shot MacPhail. […]
Last year, Brandon Garrett, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, studied 200 cases in which people were freed from prison after DNA evidence proved them innocent. He found that erroneous eyewitness identifications were the leading cause of wrongful convictions, occurring in 79 percent of the cases he studied… Yet on this flimsy basis we make decisions about someone’s life or death?
That’s ridiculous and obscene. And it is evidence of moral cowardice that we countenance the ridiculous and the obscene so complacently and complaisantly, never daring to look too closely at what is happening here because if we look we might accidentally “see,” and then, by God, we might be compelled to act, to admit that capital punishment is incompatible with justice and to gather the courage to say to families like the MacPhails, “Look, we feel your grief and our hearts break for you, but what you’re demanding we do is wrong, if for no other reason than that we, being human, just may, conceivably, make mistakes.”
Yes, we owe the Mac Phail family our compassion and understanding. But you know what? We owe Troy Davis’ family something, too.
SEE ALSO: FBI director William Sessions, a death penalty proponent, writes urging the Supreme Court to grant Cert.