Sunday, October 5, 2008

IS AMERICAN JUSTICE TRULY BLIND?

Troy Anthony Davis, convicted in 1991 for the fatal shooting of a Savannah, Georgia police officer is still embroiled in what has become a 19 year odyssey to save his life. Seven of the nine witnesses against him have recanted their stories -- many alleging police coercion. Yet he has twice come within hours of a scheduled execution - the first time within 24 hours of death and the second time within two. As per eyewitness testimony, syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. offered the following on courant.com in his article today entitled, “Grief, Rage Pave Path to Deadly Injustice”:

   Last year, Brandon Garrett, a professor of law at the University of Virginia studied 200 cases in which people were freed from prison after DNA evidence proved them innocent. He found that erroneous eyewitness identifications were the leading cause of wrongful convictions, occurring in 79 percent of the cases he studied.

In the meantime, famed author and attorney Vincent Bugliosi is calling for the prosecution of President George W. Bush for murder to very little media fanfare. He correctly asserts in an excerpt from his New York Times bestseller, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder”, that if President Bush lied to get our country to invade Iraq (as most Americans believe), he should be tried for the murder of our soldiers. Bugliosi also highlights Bush’s own attitude as Texas governor that mass murderers deserve the death penalty versus life imprisonment. All of this begs the questions: Why is Troy Anthony Davis still fighting for his life while George W. Bush hasn’t even been indicted? Is American justice truly blind?