Taki's Mag

Troy Davis

Here is a secret well-known among attorneys: By the time a criminal is convicted, he has usually committed at least three other serious crimes. Here is a secret well-known among policemen: They are almost always sure who did it, even if they cannot prove the case. Here is something not so secret: An exception proves the rule.

It is true there are innocent people in jail and death-row inmates who did not commit the charged crime. Police are sometimes wrong in their suspicions. Yet all of these truisms are in the minority when compared to the whole. If someone is on death row, they almost without exception did the deed.

Everyone in America receives several second chances. If one happens to be a criminal, these are multiplied manifold. In most cases, one need commit a particularly abhorrent act before first-time jail accrues. Still there are those who bemoan the perpetrators’ lot, at least until they themselves fall victim.

One of the old saws of such Solons is that (nasal-pitch necessitated) “We would rather have ten guilty men go free than convict one innocent!” This maxim originates not as popularly believed with Cotton Mather, but from his father, Increase Mather, who sat in Salem. The real quote: “It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned.” Given such logic, no one should ever be convicted since there are no such things as witches. One wishes such were true of more dastardly offenses.

During the middle 1980s to the middle 1990s there was an absurd satanic-cult hysteria which gripped law-enforcement outlets across America, leading to outrageous verdicts from people who ought to have known better. This included California’s fraudulent Kern County child-abuse cases and the recent release of the West Memphis Three. In each there was far more reasonable doubt than common sense. Whenever a prosecutorial case rests on otherworldly intervention, a jury should step far away for an unbiased examination.

Collective punishment is committed all the time without comment. The treatment of postwar Germany (and current-war Iraq), middle-class college students applying to the Ivy League, and contemporary affirmative-action policies are all examples. Somehow, only when it involves cop-killers are we to take umbrage.

It is argued that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, because 30% of the time eyewitnesses are incorrect in their identifications. This is one reason few cases should rest solely on such evidence. But this still means an eyewitness is correct two-thirds of the time. Multiple eyewitness accounts only enhance this reliability.

So comes the hysteria over one Troy Davis, who killed a police officer—or not, depending upon whom one believes. Seven of nine eyewitnesses have now recanted their testimony. But one gives testimony under oath and recants without consequence. The former is therefore by definition more reliable. There are still two witnesses who state Davis pulled the trigger. Even if he didn’t, he was still a no-account thug fighting with police and others in the middle of the night, causing more than one person to get shot and an officer’s death.

Thus, there is scant pity here for Davis who may be innocent but almost certainly is not. (He was accused and convicted of shooting a second man, also in the face, in a passing automobile that night, though the police officer’s death has obscured that fact.)

Far more important than the Davis case is that of Michael Allison. Oh? The reader has not heard of him? No constant televised coverage? No candlelight vigils? It is hardly surprising. Yet his case is far more important than one of violent thuggery.

An Illinois mechanic, Allison had the temerity to videotape police as they confiscated an auto on his mother’s property. He was charged with five counts of wiretapping and faced up to 75 years in prison. Allison rejected a plea offer and later mercifully won his case. A garbled ruling from the bench was based on the antiquated but surprisingly still-alive First Amendment. Allison’s obstinacy saved himself and the liberties of many more.

Eighty-five-year-old British pensioner Norman Scarth was sentenced to six months (less one day) imprisonment for having the cheek to record court proceedings in pursuit of exposing malfeasance. His sentence was halved due to “mental health” concerns, as anyone intent on righting corruption in England must by necessity be daft.

These are peaceful, hard-working, honest people who find themselves on the wrong side of authority. They aren’t troublemakers except in the sense that they see trouble coming and want to make it more difficult for those willing to impose it upon us all.

Of all the court cases which come to trial, this type would seem to necessitate the most scrutiny. Such prosecutions have authoritarianism’s ominous overtones. They portend the end of freedom as we enjoy it.

Few of us are likely to be unfairly accused of murder with malice. Yet for all of us there is the looming danger of having our rights “legislated” away while we focus on peripheral matters such as useless brawlers or the outright obscenities of humanity.

There is police and prosecutorial abuse, yet it rarely shows itself in the instances of extremely violent individuals arrested for heinous actions. It is more general and subtle and seeks not as its victim one murderer but an entire way of living. This powerful tendency acts not in dramatic legal cases, but in quietly forgotten courtrooms in out-of-the-way jurisdictions.

As for death-row inmates in general, one oughtn’t worry over them. We should save our concern for ourselves and the unnoticed and largely unreported insidious laws and lawsuits that quietly wend their way ever tighter around our liberties and do far more damage than anyone on The Last Mile ever imagined possible.