WWH ~~ As The Cookie Crumbles: Execution

(Note: This essay was composed during the course of Wednesday, Sept. 21. I never held out ANY hope that the crackkkers on the Ga. Pardons board were gonna rescind the death warrant. I had tentatively begun it this way: "Troy Davis is probably dead by now...") When news came that the execution had been performed, it was too late to go back to the site-owner and change it.

Good MORNING, Hippies, hither and yon!

Today's crumbling cookie is of a deadly variety...

Troy Anthony Davis is still alive. Apparently the US Supreme Court ordered a delay--not a stay in his execution. This did NOT come from the State of Georgia, even though there was substantial doubt almost from the first moment that he was guilty of the crimes for which he was supposed executed Wednesday night.

Troy Davis was an unlucky man. You just about can't get in deeper shit in the South than being a Black man, with a record (which EVERY young black man has got) accused of killing a cop.

That was "then," 1989, and he was him, and the police in Savannah GA, weren't gonna take any particular care to see that the exact niceties of the law were too rigorously followed, that principles about uncontaminated identification were too scrupulously observed. And neither the DA not the Judge were overly fastidious about what testimony was included and/or excluded. They had a dead cop, and a Black suspect, and that was enough.

The case against Davis was strong enough to get the death penalty for a Black man convicted in Georgia in 1989 for murdering a cop.

The thing was, son: SOME Negrow had killed a cop, and SOME Negrow was gonna pay, not for his sins, but as a lesson to the other, potentially uppity Negrows in Savannah, GA.

Witnesses recanting, accusations of police intimidation, and scores of trial errors, along with the pleas from concerned citizens everywhere, from Amnesty International, and 650 thousand internet petitions, didn't swayed the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. I suspected all along that they weren't going to. As far as they were concerned, as soon as this became a "dang librul cause celebre," those crackkker spines on the Georgia Pardon Board were gonna go all rigid. They'd execute that "boy" if they never did anything else.

More than 60 percent of Murkins still support capital punishment. And most of them would support it it even if they had incontrovertible evidence that the innocent had sometimes been executed, according to a study I saw reported about 15 years ago, in The Nation, iirc. That level of support remains, I suspect, mostly, because that percentage of people do not expect themselves ever to have to face it, ESPECIALLY unjustly inflicted.

Cuz that sort of thing just doesn't happen to "our kind" of people. Except that it looks like it actually did happen in Texas, back around # 175 of the current Perry record-breaking onslaught of official blood-letting, when--relying on over-zealous prosecution, and flawed forensics, a Texas jury convicted, and sentenced to death, and The State of Texas executed a man named Cameron Todd Willingham for committing an arson that killed his children. One of "us"...It happens so infrequently that it's memorable. Besides, Justice Antonin "Vafanculo; the Big Canoli" Scalia says if procedures have been properly followed, actual innocence is no bar to execution. No. really...

I've seen posts on Fbook today villifying St. Barry for not intervening in the matter but that's specious, and dishonest.

Because Obombster can command drone raids does not mean he can order Georgia to release a prisoner. He can order YOU shot on sight, if he deems you a threat to the Security of the State. But he has no authority to intervene if Georgia wants to commit capital punishment in the name of its citizens.

Those two things are not in the same universes of discourse.

He's culpable enough for the sins of commission and omission in the normal run of things. No need to blame him for that for about which he REALLY can do nothing.

Anyway, that's how it crumbled for Troy Davis yesterday.

Now don't forget to go by the store and pcik up some WorldWide Hippies stuff. Too kewl ampules, t-shirts and bumperstickers. So I'll know ya when I see ya at the Beach, hippies!