Dennis Prager spent two hours of his radio show today on the following story.
For decades, liberals tried persuading Americans to abolish the death penalty, using their usual argument: hysterical sobbing.
Only when the media began lying about innocent people being executed did support for the death penalty begin to waver, falling from 80 percent to about 60 percent in a little more than a decade. (Silver lining: That’s still more Americans than believe in man-made global warming.)
Fifty-nine percent of Americans now believe that an innocent man has been executed in the last five years. There is more credible evidence that space aliens have walked among us than that an innocent person has been executed in this country in the past 60 years, much less the past five years.
But unless members of the public are going to personally review trial transcripts in every death penalty case, they have no way of knowing the truth. The media certainly won’t tell them.
It’s nearly impossible to receive a death sentence these days — unless you do something completely crazy like shoot a cop in full view of dozens of witnesses in a Burger King parking lot, only a few hours after shooting at a passing car while exiting a party.
That’s what Troy Davis did in August 1989. Davis is the media’s current baby seal of death row.
After a two-week trial with 34 witnesses for the state and six witnesses for the defense, the jury of seven blacks and five whites took less than two hours to convict Davis of Officer Mark MacPhail’s murder, as well as various other crimes. Two days later, the jury sentenced Davis to death.
Now, a brisk 22 years after Davis murdered Officer MacPhail, his sentence will finally be administered this week — barring any more of the legal shenanigans that have kept taxpayers on the hook for Davis’ room and board for the past two decades.
(The average time on death row is 14 years. Then liberals turn around and triumphantly claim the death penalty doesn’t have any noticeable deterrent effect. As the kids say: Duh.)
It has been claimed — in The New York Times and Time magazine, for example — that there was no “physical evidence” connecting Davis to the crimes that night.
Davis pulled out a gun and shot two strangers in public. What “physical evidence” were they expecting? No houses were broken into, no cars stolen, no rapes or fistfights accompanied the shootings. Where exactly would you look for DNA? And to prove what?
