Tea Partiers dead wrong

Shortly after 11 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 21, Troy Davis was killed by agents of the state of Georgia

He deserved to die, said the state, because he shot and killed Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail in a Burger King parking lot the evening of Aug. 18, 1989.

{mosads}The only problem is: It now looks like he didn’t do it. No murder weapon was recovered, so Davis’s conviction was based on eyewitness accounts. Yet seven out of nine original witnesses — several of whom claimed police coercion — voluntarily came forward to recant their testimony. And three members of the jury that sent him to death row back in 1989 now say that, based on new evidence, they made a mistake.

Surely, in this great country, with a system of justice based on the principle that guilt must be established “beyond a reasonable doubt,” even for sending a man to prison for a month, no state would execute someone about whose guilt so many serious doubts had been raised. Yet that’s exactly what happened. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles ignored the fact that almost the entire prosecution case against Davis had collapsed. On Sept. 20, the board refused clemency. The next day, Georgia most likely killed an innocent man.

Even though support for the death penalty has slowly declined over the years, it still earned the support of 62 percent of Americans in 2010, according to the Pew Research poll. 

Now, here’s what I find interesting — and totally contradictory. Those conservative Tea Partiers who support the death penalty so strongly are the very same anti-government forces who claim that government can’t do anything right. Isn’t that strange? They don’t trust the government on schools, immigration, healthcare, taxes, regulation, environment or anything else. Yet they are 100 percent confident the government never makes a mistake when it comes to the death penalty. The only thing the government does right, in their warped worldview, is: kill!

Of course, they are dead wrong. And not just in the case of Troy Davis. Take the Innocence Project of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. Since its founding in 1992, the project has, through DNA testing, established the innocence and won the release of 273 prisoners in 34 states and the District of Columbia. Seventeen of them were on death row.

Yes, even in Texas, mistakes have been made. In 2004, for example, Rick Perry refused to stay the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, who’d been sentenced to death for arson, even though experts later testified that the evidence used to convict him was junk science. 

Bottom line: If you can’t trust the government to do anything else right, it’s monumentally stupid to think it always gets the death penalty right. 

Ironically, the state motto of Georgia is “Wisdom, Justice, Moderation” — three virtues sadly lacking in the case of Troy Davis.

Press is host of the nationally syndicated “Bill Press Show.”