Maybe this all over.Troy Davis has had his days and years in court.
I feel our Justice system has finally done their job. Troy Davis should have made better decisions in his life the night of Mark MacPhail's murder. Davis had already shot at another person just an hour before. The shell casings at both scenes match according to the court records. The MacPhail Family deserve for this to come to an end.
"Sixteen years ago a jury of Davis' peers found him guilty of murder of an off-duty police officer and sentenced him to death."
Ok. This appears to be the crux of your point of view here. And I agree, assuming that the legal system is working as it should and a jury finds a defendant guilty, that person should be subjected to whatever penalty is imposed on him/her in accordance with the law.
What this implies is a great deal of trust -- trust in the jurors, trust in witness testimonies, and trust that the evidence was gathered in an unbiased manner.
What bothers me about this case is that 7 of the 9 witnesses who testified in the case have retracted their statements. Each one claims to have been coerced to testify against Davis by authorities in one way or another. (Never mind that one of the remaining two witnesses was, himself, a suspect in the murder.) Another witness later admitted to being responsible for the shooting earlier in the night, and for placing shell casings at the scene where McPhail was murdered. These shell casings were the only material evidence presented in the trial.
As I see it, we can view this in one of two ways. Either most of the witnesses who testified on behalf of the prosecution really were unfairly coerced by police to do so, or they were not coerced and chose to retract their statements themselves.
As I said earlier, pointing to the fact that Davis was convicted by a jury of his peers as reason for him to be executed implies a great deal of trust in the system, most notably (in this case), in the testimonies of witnesses. By extension, this implies that we believe whole-heartedly what the witnesses had to say during the trial.
If we trusted these people in the court room while they were testifying, should we not trust them now? If we cannot trust them now because they have changed their stories, why should we trust what they said in the court room? In other words, if a person's story changes from night to day, there is no longer any reason to believe what they say now, or said in the past (the exception, of course, being that of an individual coerced into lying). That is, the trust is gone, and trust in the system, including testimonies, (unless I'm mistaken) is the reason given for why this man should die.
I believe a person is innocent until proven guilty, and a liar is a liar. If they lied then and we trusted them, and they lie now and we don't, there is a gross inconsistency in our logic. The fact is, we have no way of knowing if they lied in the court room or when they were retracting their statements, or both, or neither. That means their testimonies meant nothing, and we're back at square one, where a man is innocent until proven guilty.
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