Why Do Liberals Have Such a Soft Spot for Cop Killers Like Troy Davis?

by John Hawkins | September 23, 2011 5:30 am

Mumia Abu-Jamal killed Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Leonard Peltier murdered FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. Liberals enthusiastically supported both of them. Now, the latest liberal cause célèbre is Troy Davis, who shot police officer Mark MacPhail to death in a crowded Burger King parking lot.

We have a justice system that is already ridiculously slanted against the death penalty. It usually takes decades of appeals and retrials to put anyone to death, no matter how ironclad the evidence is against him. Despite farfetched claims that large numbers of innocent men have been put to death, there’s actually no solid evidence that an innocent man has been executed in this country in the last fifty years. Of course, that doesn’t stop people from making unproven claims to the contrary and backing it up with deliberately deceptive evidence. The only thing that proves is that if there’s a market for anything, somebody will step up to provide it. Liberals don’t like the death penalty; so they are desperate to find proof that innocent men have been executed and there are people who are willing to make money providing that evidence, no matter how far they have to stretch to deliver it.

In truth, even if an innocent man were executed, it wouldn’t change anything. We already have a system that’s slanted in favor of the defendants in criminal trials and heavily against the death penalty. In fact, if anything, our justice system probably leans too far in favor of the criminal and too heavily against getting justice for the victims. See Casey Anthony and OJ Simpson for evidence of that. Since that’s the case, the only way to make sure an innocent man is NEVER unjustly jailed would be to refuse to put anyone in prison. If you recognize that we do need to punish criminals for their crimes, that the system is already weighted in favor of the criminal, and that it’s impossible to never make a mistake, then you have to accept the idea that despite our best efforts, mistakes are going to happen.

Of course, despite the incredibly slanted accounts you may have read, Troy Davis is not one of these mistakes[1]. More than a dozen courts looked at the trial and came to that conclusion — and no wonder. Davis shot a cop to death in public. There were 34 witnesses at the trial. Some of them were strangers. Some of them were friends of Davis. To this day, there are several people, some strangers and some former friends, who said they saw Davis shoot Officer Mark MacPhail and haven’t recanted. How many eyewitnesses to a murder should you need to convict someone?

The reality is that Troy Davis was executed because Troy Davis was guilty as sin.

Yet, we hear people moaning about poor, poor Troy Davis. How about poor, poor Officer Mark MacPhail? How about his family? Don’t shed any tears for Troy Davis. He doesn’t deserve it. The people who deserve sympathy today are the family members of Mark MacPhail who were cruelly forced to wait so long to get justice.

This post originally appeared at The Hufington Post[2].