When I was still teaching, I caught a student plagiarizing a paper. It wasn’t just a matter of improper attribution, either–she had copied and pasted whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, apparently unaware that I knew how to use Google. The next day, her mother called the school and discussed the problem with me. “My children don’t cheat,” she said. This was an article of faith, not a subject for debate. Other kids certainly cheated, but not her children, so regardless of the contrary evidence I could produce, she would not believe it.
Tonight, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, and many people, myself included, believe there is reasonable doubt about Davis’ guilt. Davis was convicted purely on the basis of eyewitness testimony, which even the courts are starting to admit is unreliable. (Speaking as someone who has been the victim of violent crime, I know firsthand that the memory goes straight to hell in a fight or flight situation.) Furthermore, several of those witnesses have recanted.
Nevertheless, Davis was convicted, and his appeals went through the proper channels, so according to those, such as Rick Perry, who sleep soundly in the confidence that the government has never executed an innocent man, he must be guilty. You see, our government doesn’t kill innocent people. Other countries may do that sort of thing, but our justice system is above all that, so there’s no need to examine the massive piles of evidence that show it regularly makes mistakes.
Because if we have to question whether our government kills innocent people, we have to question its moral basis. Or lack thereof.
Joe Carter 
patrick 
sal magundi 
Louis Becker 
Matt 
tz 
Capital punishment is problematic and in a more perfect world I would prefer that it be dropped. But we live in an era of criminality and disorder, an era in which a growing criminal underclass threatens us all. Given the certainty of human error, executing innocents is a certainty. But does that negate capital punishment? I think not. The hard fact is that all human institutions are imperfect and fail from time to time. But the wheels of society must run nevertheless.
One avenue to reduce the likelihood of a completely innocent person being executed would be to reserve capital punishment to those with prior violent criminal convictions. If only career criminals faced the death penalty the nightmare scenario of an honest citizen facing the extinction of life for being in the wrong place at the wrong time would disappear.
Unfortunately, this avenue is closed to us as our legal betters consider this a violation of the equal protection clause. So in a sense, the possibly innocent man executed last night can lay his fate at the door of liberal, civil rights lawyers. Equal protection = equal jeopardy.