In the Absence of Proof
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed: May 23, 2009
The options are running out for Troy Davis, a man who has been condemned to
death for killing a police officer in Georgia, but whose guilt is seriously
in question
It's bad enough that we still execute people in the United States. It's
absolutely chilling that we're willing to do it when we're not even sure
we've got the right person in our clutches.
Mr. Davis came within an hour of execution last fall. His relatives and his
attorney, Jason Ewart, had come to the state prison to say goodbye. Mr.
Davis had eaten his last meal, and Mr. Ewart was ready to witness his
execution.
The mind-numbing tension was broken with a last-minute stay from the Supreme
Court. The case then made its way to the United States Court of Appeals for
the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, which ruled 2-to-1 last month against Mr.
Davis's petition for a hearing to examine new evidence pointing to his
innocence.
The countdown to the ghoulish ritual of execution resumed.
Mr. Davis was convicted of shooting a police officer to death in the parking
lot of a Burger King in Savannah, Ga., in 1989. The officer, Mark Allen
MacPhail, was murdered as he went to the aid of a homeless man who was being
pistol-whipped.
I'm opposed to the death penalty, but I would have a very hard time finding
even the faintest glimmer of sympathy for the person who murdered that
officer. The problem with taking Mr. Davis's life in response to the murder
of Officer MacPhail is the steadily growing mass of evidence that Mr. Davis
was not the man who committed the murder.
Nine witnesses testified against Mr. Davis at his trial in 1991, but seven
of the nine have since changed their stories. One of those seven, Dorothy
Ferrell, said she was on parole when she testified and was afraid that she'd
be sent back to prison if she didn't agree to cooperate with the authorities
by fingering Mr. Davis.
"I told the detective that Troy Davis was the shooter," she said in an
affidavit, "even though the truth was that I didn't know who shot the
officer."
Another witness, Darrell Collins, who was a teenager at the time of the
murder, said the police had "scared" him into falsely testifying by
threatening to charge him as an accessory to the crime. He said he was told
that he would go to prison and might never get out if he refused to help
make the case against Mr. Davis.
This week Mr. Davis's lawyers, led by Mr. Ewart of the Arnold & Porter law
firm in Washington, filed a last-ditch, long-shot petition with the Supreme
Court, asking it to intervene and allow Mr. Davis's claims of innocence to
be fully examined.
An extraordinary group of 27 former judges and prosecutors joined in an
amicus brief in support of the petition. Among those who signed on were
William Sessions, the former director of the F.B.I.; Larry Thompson, a U.S.
attorney general from 2001-2003; the former Congressman Bob Barr, who was
the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986-1990; and
Rudolph Gerber, who was an Arizona trial and court of appeals judge from
1979-2001.
The counsel of record for the amicus brief is the Harvard law professor
Charles Ogletree. The brief asserts that the Supreme Court should intervene
"because Mr. Davis can make an extraordinary showing through new, never
reviewed evidence that strongly points to his innocence, and thus his
execution would violate the Constitution."
The very idea of executing someone who may in fact be innocent should also
violate the nation's conscience. Mr. Davis is incarcerated. He's no threat
to anyone. Where's the harm in seeking out the truth and trying to see that
justice is really done?
And if the truth can't be properly sorted out, we should be unwilling to let
a human life be taken on mere surmise.
There was no physical evidence against Mr. Davis, and no murder weapon was
ever found. At least three witnesses who testified against him at his trial
(and a number of others who were not part of the trial) have since said that
a man named Sylvester "Redd" Coles admitted to killing the police officer.
Mr. Coles, who was at the scene, and who, according to witnesses, later
ditched a gun of the same caliber as the murder weapon, is one of the two
witnesses who have not recanted. The other is a man who initially told
investigators that he could not identify the killer. Nearly two years later,
at the trial, he testified that the killer was Mr. Davis.
Officer MacPhail's murder was a horrendous crime that cries out for justice.
Killing Mr. Davis, rather than remedying that tragedy, would only compound
it.
***
From: earthactionnetwork@earthlink.net
Ccommentary on global warming legislation
political realists rejoice, climate science realists demand more
House committee approves landmark (bipartisan!) clean energy and climate
bill
by Joseph Romm
22 May 2009
NOTE: Unexpectedly, Rep. Bono Mack (R-CA) voted "yes" - and the bill passed
33-25! She later said, "While I still have significant concerns about this
bill, particularly with regard to its cost and its failure to recognize
innovative technologies like advanced nuclear energy, I believe this is the
right direction for our district, for our nation and for our future."
UPDATE: Al Gore's statement is at the end. The New York Times labels
Waxman-Markey " the most ambitious energy and global warming legislation
ever debated in Congress."
Every journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step - including stopping
human-caused global warming at "safe levels," as close as possible to 2°C.
Many people have asked me how I can reconcile my climate science realism,
which demands far stronger action than the Waxman-Markey bill requires, and
my climate politics realism, which has led me to strongly advocate passage
of this flawed bill.
The short answer is that Waxman-Markey is the only game in town. If it
fails, I see no chance whatsoever of stabilizing anywhere near 350 to 450
ppm since serious U.S. action would certainly be off the table for years,
the effort to jumpstart the clean energy economy in this country would
stall, the international negotiating process would fall apart, and any
chance of a deal with China would be dead. Warming of 5°C or more by
century's end would be all but inevitable, with 850 to 1000+ ppm. If
Waxman-Markey becomes law, then I see a genuine 10% to 20% chance of
averting catastrophe - not high, but not zero.
Today was the first genuine step that the U.S. House of Representatives has
ever taken on climate. And since the Committee is stuffed with members
representing traditional (i.e. polluting) energy industries, it shouldn't be
harder for the full House to pass this bill than it was for the committee.
That said, the House GOP leadership is certainly much savvier than Joe
Barton (see here) - and agricultural and other interest groups have yet to
flex their muscle. Much work remains keep the bill as strong as possible
even in the House.
For climate politics realists, it will be a staggering achievement if, in 12
months or so, an energy and climate bill that looks something like Waxman-
Markey is signed into law by President Obama. After all, the United States
hasn't enacted a major economy-wide clean air bill since the Clean Air Act
amendments of 1990. And that bill had a cap-and-trade system where 97% of
the permits were given to polluters. And it focused on direct, short-term
health threats to Americans.
The forces that are lined up against serious climate action today are
incredible:
The Congressional GOP are almost unanimous in their opposition to any
serious climate bill or any clean energy bill (see "Hill conservatives
reject all 3 climate strategies) - and they are committed to demagoguing the
cost issue even to the point of embarrassing the outside-of-the-beltway GOP
(Republicans (sic) for Environmental Protection "call out those Republicans
who continue to spread the false claim that capping greenhouse gas pollution
will - supposedly - cost American families $3,100 every year.")
The polluting industries spend vast sums of money on lobbyists, on deceptive
ads, and on right wing think tanks who spread disinformation. The status
quo media under-reports and misreports the climate science and climate
economics (see Must-read (again) study: How the press bungles its coverage
of climate economics - "The media's decision to play the stenographer role
helped opponents of climate action stifle progress."). The climate science
activists can't even agree on a message or whether they should even talk
about climate science (see Mark Mellman must read on climate messaging: "A
strong public consensus has emerged on the reality and severity of global
warming, as well as on the need for federal action" - ecoAmerica "could
hardly be more wrong"). From a political perspective, Democrats are being
asked to face an onslaught of deceptive campaign ads claiming they have
raised energy taxes in order to pass a bill whose climate benefits will not
be apparent for a very long time - although the clean energy and jobs
benefits will begin almost immediately (Nobelist Krugman: Climate action
"now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump" by
giving "businesses a reason to invest in new equipment and facilities").
And many of their constituents, primarily the conservatives and the
conservative-leaning independents, don't even think human caused global
warming is a problem that needs aggressive government action, assuming they
think it is a problem at all (see here).
From the perspective of political realism, it will be a great challenge just
to stop this bill from being weakened as it winds itself through the House
and especially the Senate.
From the perspective of climate science realists, the bill has two gaping
flaws. And I don't mean the allocations for big polluters. I know many of
my readers disagree, but I just don't think that the allocation undermines
the goals of the bill at all, and in fact are a perfectly reasonable way of
satisfying political needs while preventing windfalls for polluters and
preserving prices.
The first flaw is the 2 billion offsets that polluters can potentially use
instead of their own emissions reductions. I have previously explained why
I am far less worried about domestic offsets (see here). In a regulated
market with a cap, many of the domestic offsets will represent real
reductions of US greenhouse gas emissions, and the total supply of cheap
domestic offsets will be limited. I will blog tomorrow on why I do not
believe the international offsets threaten the overall integrity of the
bill. The bottom line is that the vast amounts of moderate-cost near-term
domestic emissions reductions strategies - energy efficiency, conservation,
replacing coal power with natural gas-fired power, wind power, biomass
cofiring, concentrated solar thermal power, recycled energy, geothermal, and
hydro power (see " An introduction to the core climate solutions") - will
be cheaper (in quantity) than most of the offsets will be in 2020.
Second, the 2020 target is too weak (see here). Given the lost 8 years of
the Bush administration, it was inevitable that a bill which doesn't even
impose a cap until 2012 could not have the same 2020 target (compared to
1990 levels) than the Europeans are considering.
That means we're going to build too much polluting crap in the next decade.
That means we'll have to go back and unbuild it at some point. More
expensive, sure, than doing it right the first time, but no more difficult
than deploying a dozen or so accelerated stabilization wedges globally in
three to four decades needed to beat 450 ppm.
For me, a two-term President Obama (together with the next three Congresses)
cannot solve the global warming problem, but can create the conditions that
allow the next couple of presidents to do what is needed. Or he can be
thwarted, making it all but impossible for future presidents.
The only hope for stabilizing at 350 to 450 ppm is a WWII-scale and WWII-
style effort as I have said many times. And that implies a level of
desperation we don't have now (see " What are the near-term climate Pearl
Harbors?"). When we have that desperation, probably in the 2020s, we'll
want to already have:
substantially dropped below the business-as-usual emissions path
started every major business planning for much deeper reductions
goosed the cleantech venture and financing community
put in place the entire framework for U.S. climate regulations
accelerated many tens of gigawatts of different types of low-carbon energy
into the marketplace
put billions into developing advanced low-carbon technology
started building out the smart, green grid of the 21st century
trained and created millions of clean energy jobs
negotiated a working international climate regime
brought China into the process
This bill is crucial to achieving all of those vital goals.
Kudos to Henry Waxman and Ed Markey - and a great many other progressive
politicians and advocates - for making this historic moment happen.
UPDATE: Nobelist Al Gore today issued the following statement on the
passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act out of the House
Energy and Commerce Committee:
I commend Chairmen Waxman and Markey for their leadership in this historic
action by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The bill represents a crucial step forward in addressing the global climate
crisis, the need for millions of new green jobs to end the recession, and
the national security threats that have long been linked to our growing
dependence on foreign oil and other fossil fuels.
I encourage Congress to further strengthen this excellent legislation during
floor consideration and move to pass this bill in both the House and the
Senate this year.
Joseph Romm is the editor of Climate Progress and a senior fellow at the
Center for American Progress.
For more info on Earth Action Network go to www.earthactionnetwork.org and
for more info about Mha Atma see www.drmhaatma.com.
"The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that the
leaders have to courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but
have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less
wasteful."
--Wendell Berry
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