There are several indisputable facts about the Davis case. First, several hours before McPhail’s shooting death, there was a shooting at a party in the Cloverdale neighborhood in Savannah. Davis was, in fact, at the Cloverdale party. He was implicated in that shooting incident by either direct eyewitness testimony or indirect witness statements saying the “shooter” wore a “white” shirt. The shooting seriously wounded Michael Cooper who was rushed to a local hospital. The shooting was reported to the authorities at 11:29 p.m. on August 18, 1989.

            Shortly after 1:00 a.m. on August 19 the authorities received a report that an individual had been shot in a Burger King parking lot. The shooting victim turned out to be officer McPhail who was working on off-duty private security detail at the time. There are several indisputable facts leading up to the actual shooting death of McPhail. Larry Young, an African-American male, was harassed and attack by three African-American males shortly after he left a convenience store near Burger King and as he was returning to the vehicle parked in the Burger King parking lot where his girlfriend Harriett Murray awaited. One member of the trio struck Young upside the head with a gun. He ran toward a van stopped at the Burger King take-out window, pleading that someone call the police. McPhail approached the group and ordered the trio to “hold it.” One member of the group pulled a weapon, shot McPhail in the face, and after the officer fell mortally wounded to the ground, the gunman then shot the officer two or three more times. While the gunman was killing Officer McPhail, the other two members of the assaultive group fled.

            The gunman who shot McPhail wore a white t-shirt. A second member of the trio wore a yellow t-shirt. The trio were indisputably identified as Davis, Sylvester “Red” Coles, and Darrell Collins. Davis was identified as the individual in the white t-shirt while Coles was identified as the individual in the yellow t-shirt. Davis was implicated in Officer McPhail’s murder either by direct eyewitness identification or through statements that the gunman wore a white t-shirt. The police and the prosecution would eventually amass nearly three dozen witnesses—all of whom were overwhelmingly consistent that Davis (or the African-American male wearing the white t-shirt) shot and killed Officer McPhail.

            Even before Davis’ trial and during his trial, several of the witnesses who had given earlier statements to the police began to change or alter the substance of what they conveyed to the authorities. Nonetheless, there was compelling evidence presented at the trial that Troy Davis killed Officer McPhail. Davis testified in his own defense. He admitted being a member of the trio that attacked Larry Young and who were confronted by Officer McPhail. But Davis said that it was Coles, not he, who killed the officer. Those witnesses who had either recanted or altered portions of their earlier statements seem to support the theory that Coles was the actual shooter.

            By 1996 Davis’ attorneys and supporters had secured six affidavits from witnesses in the case supporting the condemned inmate’s “actual innocence.” But all the state and federal courts rejected Davis’ bid to get a new trial based on the theory of “actual innocence” supported by the six affidavits. However, by July 2007 Davis’ attorneys had amassed 26 affidavits which either attested to Davis’ innocence or implicated Coles as McPhail’s shooter. The state courts, as well as the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, conducted exhaustive inquiries into this new evidence only to conclude that it was either not sufficient or credible enough to overturn the jury’s finding of guilt. This “new evidence” worked its away all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and surprisingly the court turned away from its previous rejections in the Davis case and ordered that the condemned inmate’s claim of actual innocence be heard by the lower federal courts.

            This precipitated Judge Moore’s full blown evidentiary hearing on the factual basis for Davis’ actual innocence claim and his subsequent exhaustive analysis of both the factual and legal issues that led him to conclude Davis’ had failed to prove the actual innocence claim by “clear and convincing” evidence. Judge Moore was particularly concerned about two of the witnesses who gave Davis’ attorneys affidavits. One was Dorothy Ferrell who testified at trial that the shooter wore a white t-shirt. Her affidavit recanted her earlier testimony which she said had been given in order to secure favorable treatment from prosecutors. The other witness was Larry Young who testified at trial that Sylvester Coles was the individual wearing the yellow t-shirt the night officer McPhail was killed. His affidavit recanted that testimony which had been given, according to Young, because it was what the police wanted him to say.

            Judge Moore’s concern about the Ferrell/Young affidavits was pricked because Davis’ attorneys refused to let either witness testify about their affidavits at the “actual innocence” hearing. Judge Moore noted that while the affidavits of both these witnesses offered clear recantation testimony, their value had been destroyed by Davis’ intentional decision not to let them testify at the actual innocence hearing.

            The decision by Davis’ attorney not to let Ferrell and Young take the stand under oath and reaffirm their sworn affidavit statements will do perpetual harm to the condemned inmate’s claim of actual innocence. They are two of his most important “actual innocence” witnesses and there was no justifiable excuse for not letting them testify. The credibility and reliability of virtually all the other affidavits were easily discredited, both factually and legally, by Judge Moore.

            Davis’ supporters cannot now look the American and international public in the eye and claim that he is innocent of the murder of Officer McPhail when the inmate himself through his attorneys refused to let two important recantation witnesses testify in support of that claim. Why not let the witnesses testify? What is the Davis camp hiding? My message to Troy Davis and his supporters is this: If you want me to believe your claim of innocence, don’t conceal information from me by not letting witnesses give live in-court testimony. That dog won’t hunt in these woods. Davis was at the scene of the crime. His only path to innocence is through convincing the public that Coles killed officer McPhail. That’s a hard theory to sell by itself, much less hiding evidence that could possibly support the theory.

            Davis had his best shot with the federal “actual innocence” hearing. He blew it. You can’t blame the courts for this one.

            John Hardy Rose was executed in 2001. He was convicted of sexually assaulting a neighbor after he stabbed and strangled her to death. He burned the body and disposed of it in a remote area in the western part of the state. Rose’s attorney, Ken Rose (no relation), has said that there was no doubt that his client killed the woman, the Raleigh News & Observer reported, “but there was a question of whether the killing was premeditated or impulsive.”

            The defense attorney said the crime lab did not disclose “negative results” of a test for blood. This withholding of evidence was critical. “There was testimony that there was blood all over the apartment, but also testimony he cleaned up the apartment,” the attorney explained. “So, what was it the agents were actually looking at?”

            Rose said the negative blood results test could have been used to mitigate his client’s sentence to life imprisonment or resulted in a lesser “second-degree murder” conviction.

            Desmond Carter was executed in December 2002—the same day an inmate named Alan Gell was ordered off death row because the prosecution had withheld favorable evidence at his trial. Carter was not so lucky. An SBI crime lab analyst prepared a report saying blood was found on a piece of evidence when actually the test proved negative for blood. Carter was convicted in the stabbing death of a 71-year-old neighbor after she refused to lend him $5 to buy drugs. He confessed to the crime.

            Ken Rose, who also happened to be Carter’s last attorney, told the News & Observer that Carter’s trial attorneys were not qualified to handle a capital case and thus did not challenge the forensic evidence. “They took it at face, assuming the evidence was true,” Rose explained to the newspaper. “No one examined it to see how it affected his case.”

            The News & Observer did not detail the nature of the evidence withheld by SBI crime lab in the case of Joseph Timothy Keel who was executed in 2003 for the shooting death of his father-in-law on their hog farm. Keel’s attorney, Jay Ferguson, said he will not know the impact of the withheld evidence until he retrieves and reviews the files in the case. “This is the whole problem, there are no do-overs with the death penalty,” Ferguson told the newspaper. “We can’t go back and fix these errors.”

            Forensic science has fallen into a state of near utter disrepute because of the fraud and prosecutorial/law enforcement misconduct associated with the science. The Texas Forensic Science Commission earlier of this month finally conceded that Cameron Todd Willingham, who was put to death here in Texas on February 17, 2004 for the arson murder of his three small children, was convicted, and, yes, executed on the basis of “flawed [forensic] science

          While the commission stopped short of saying that Willingham was innocent, the fact that he was executed on the basis of flawed evidence is nothing short of shocking. The same principle applies to the three North Carolina executions. The issue is not so much that two of the men may have been innocent; the issue is that all three were executed because the State either fraudulently prepared forensic reports or withheld favorable ones. An execution is like a bell—it cannot be unrung. As Jay Ferguson indicated, bad forensics is an attorney’s worst nightmare.

          Between mistaken identifications, which was the leading factor in 75 percent of the nation’s more than 250 DNA exonerations, and flawed forensic evidence, there is no longer much doubt that innocent person(s) have been executed in this country. Each state should conduct a case-by-case review of all its death penalty cases involving convictions based almost exclusively on eyewitness identification and/or forensic evidence. The reliability, and most assuredly the credibility, of these two forms of evidence have been so discredited that no one should be put to death on the basis of one or both of them. Our fundamental notions of justice begs such a review.

            A few celebrated Cantu execution, and while perhaps unseemly, it is understandable because this leader of a gang of young thugs called the Black and Whites committed perhaps the most calculated, coldblooded crimes in Houston history with the murders of two teenage girls on June 24, 1993. The Houston Chronicle reported that the gang that hot, muggy night were “conducting a fight-filled initiation ceremony for a prospective gang member across from T.C. Jester Park when [Jennifer] Ertman, 14, and [Elizabeth] Pena, 16, crossed their paths while taking a shortcut home. The girls were hurrying along railroad tracks in the dark in order to get home by their curfew.”

            What Cantu and his five fellow gang members did to those two girls can only be described as brutal and horrific, and even 17 years after the crime  was committed, it still defies human comprehension. Its terrible memory hangs like a foreboding sadness over this city to this very day. The parents and the family, as well as many close friends, of Ertman/Pena have never, and will never, recover from the loss and grief inflicted upon them by the senselessness of the crime.

            And it was so much more than just a senseless crime. By all accounts, it was the product of Peter Cantu’s warped, psychopathic mind. He instructed the gang to grab the girls—one of whom, young Elizabeth, had made her escape but returned to face death to help her friend—encouraged them to sexually abuse the girls in every degrading manner imaginable, and ordered them to kill the two Waltrip High School teenagers in the worst possible manner. Cantu had no remorse. He and the others actually celebrated the crime, openly bragging about it to family members and friends. Ultimately, it was Cantu’s own brother, who could not comprehend the description of the murders much less the bragging celebration about them, who called 911 to finger Cantu for the crime.

            Five of the six gang members received the death penalty. The youngest in the gang, 14-year-old Venancio Medellin, received a 40-year sentence. Two of the gang members, Efrain Perez and Raul Villarreal, had their death sentences vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court because the crimes occurred when they were “juveniles.” Then in 2006 Derrick O’Brien became the first gang member executed for the Ertman/Pena murders. His execution was followed by Jose Medellin execution in 2008. Both men expressed remorse for their part of the horrific murders.

            Not Cantu. He died in the same frame of mind at 6:17 p.m. on August 17, 2010 as he had on the night of June 24, 1993 when he took the precious young lives of the two innocent teenage girls. He ordered, and enjoyed, a final meal. He was emotionless as he was led into the death chamber. He had no final statement. He did not acknowledge the presence of any of those there to witness his execution. He had no family or friends there for him. He took one deep breath as the chemicals were administered and passed over into a region of the unknown reserved for the “worst of the worst” human beings.

            Peter Cantu came into this world damaged goods. Who knows why? He grew up lean and mean. He always wanted to hurt people. He had no respect for others, not even his own blood. He liked to control, to be the meanest wolf in the pack. He did not kill to defend territory or survive in the wild. He killed because he could, and he enjoyed it. The tragedy here is that while the other five gang members were “bad kids” (and their roles in the crimes against Ertman and Pena certainly support as much), they probably would not have seized the two girls had it not been for Cantu. Human gangs are like packs of animals. They have no empathy for the individual. The individual is a target of opportunity. But the decision to attack and kill must come from the leader. Without a leader, without Cantu, the other five gang members were just five insignificant beings who lacked either the will or instinct to attack. They needed a leader to trigger that primal instinct to move and act as a savage pack. This was borne out in the revolutionary war that brought sovereign independence to this country: Scottish sharpshooters easily picked off British officers which always sent the army pack scurrying in disarray.

            So, in the final analysis of this case, Peter Cantu not only took the lives of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena but he caused the executions of Jose Medellin and Derrick O’Brien as well. And two of the remaining three gang members will never know life beyond a prison fence, and while the third may live long enough to be free one day, his life is hopelessly damaged. Seven lives destroyed by one man who left this world far more quietly than when he entered it and through the 35 years he drew its breaths of human life.

            Perhaps now the souls of those two young girls can depart to the heaven where peace and God’s love await. 

            The Columbus Dispatch reported on August 4, 2010 that prosecutors have resisted requests from Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and Attorney General Richard Cordray to have evidence in seven controversial cases subjected to DNA testing to determine guilt or innocence. Requests for DNA testing in these cases have also been rejected by various judges.

            The tragedy here is that one of the cases involves an inmate named Arthur Swanson who died in prison in 2006, but who left behind documents in his prison cell which showed how long he had tried to secure DNA testing to prove he did not rob an Amish family, according to the newspaper.

            The other six cases involve one condemned inmate currently on Ohio’s death row, two inmates serving long prison sentences, and three former inmates who simply want their name cleared.

            The governor and the attorney general both concede that while they do not have the “legal authority” to order such testing, they hope prosecutors will ultimately respect their wishes for such testing “as a matter of public policy.”

            “I really think it’s irrational not to take advantage of methods that could establish either guilt or innocence when those technologies are available to us,” Strickland told The Dispatch. “I can think of no good argument why anyone would be denied DNA testing if, in fact, there is a reasonable or relevant opportunity to bring clarity to whether or not someone is guilty of a crime.”

            Many prosecutors and judges do not see the issue with the same “clarity” as Gov. Strickland. They are so committed to the “finality of conviction” doctrine that they believe the state has a legal right to execute an innocent man if he received a “fair trial” in which all his due process rights were protected. In other words, if a procedurally correct trial takes place, an innocent man can be put to death by the state and it would not offend either the due process or cruel and unusual punishment provisions of the U.S. Constitution. That is the core of the “finality of conviction” doctrine.

            That’s why the requests for DNA testing by Strickland and Cordray are so extraordinary. They are effectively seeking to replace the “finality of conviction” doctrine with fundamental notions of “certainty and accuracy.”

            “We think certainty and accuracy are something we want in our justice system,” Cordray told The Dispatch. “We are urging them to allow testing, but we have told (prosecutors) that we will work to make sure the results are not taken the wrong way. Testing could be conclusive with guilt or innocence, but many results can be inconclusive as well.”

            It is truly remarkable to see two high ranking state officials in effect repudiate the “finality of conviction” doctrine in favor “certainty and accuracy” of criminal convictions. The criminal justice system loses absolutely nothing when DNA testing is utilized in cases that raise serious questions about the guilt of a convicted person. If the testing proves  to be either “inconclusive” or clearly reaffirms the judicial adjudication of guilt, the integrity and credibility of our justice system is reinforced. And if the testing proves that an innocent individual was wrongfully convicted, then the justice system reaffirms its commitment to due process fairness by immediately releasing that individual and compensating him/her as much as possible for the years they were wrongfully imprisoned. Strict adherence to the “final of conviction” doctrine, on the other hand, even with strong judicial support, is antipodean to our traditional notions of justice and equality—at least the notions whose praises we sing, especially on the world stage.

            In 2008 The Dispatch teamed up with the Ohio Innocence Project to investigate the state’s DNA post-conviction testing. Together, they reviewed 300 cases and found 30 of them as “prime candidates” for testing. In an article titled “Test of Convictions,” the newspaper reported that the results exonerated three inmates—all of whom had served a combined 72 years for rapes they did not convict—and reaffirmed the guilt of four others. The evidence in five other cases could not be tested because it had either been lost or destroyed. Five of the cases are part of the group of seven currently being pushed for testing by Strickland and Cordray.

            The three exonerations, standing alone, not only justify the Strickland/Cordray requests for testing in the seven cases they cited but a strong “public policy” of testing  any case when credible evidence is raised about guilt in that case. While this “public policy” may be a long way off, at least two very prominent state officials have endorsed the concept of “certainty and accuracy” over “finality” and this can only benefit our criminal justice system.

            One truth is that the death penalty is rarely imposed in this country today. There are now just 35 “death penalty states” in America—of which “one-third rarely sentence anyone to death and another third impose death sentences but rarely carry them out.” Garland notes that 80 percent of all executions which take place in this country occur in what was once known as the “Old South”—the confederate states of America—and that Texas is by far responsible for most of these executions. Garland attributes this national decline in the use of the death penalty to the fact that most states now have life without parole sentences which juries tend to favor as an option to the extreme punishment. He’s right. Texas in 2005 adopted a life without parole sentence, and the imposition of the death sentence by juries has dropped to a 35-year low. This downward death penalty trend in the nation’s leading execution state offers the best support for Garland’s position.

            Another Garland truth is that the United States is “out of step” with Europe when it comes to the death penalty, but for reasons not readily apparent to most. France was the last European nation to abolish capital punishment in 1981. While many death penalty opponents use Europe as a model for death penalty reform, Garland interestingly points out that American states engaged in such reform 100 years before European nations did. He notes that Michigan abolished the death penalty in 1846, and that the U.S. has historically tried to improve its execution techniques, “replacing hanging first with the electric chair, then the gas chamber and finally with lethal injection.

            But I must discuss here an underlying problem with this truth: each new technique for carrying out executions in this country ultimately proved worse, if not more painful, than the method it replaced. Public hangings become detestable after a number of condemned inmates were decapitated by the hangman’s drop but these executions didn’t seem all that bad after a even more condemned inmates were literally roasted alive in the electric chair. And the gas chamber proved to be so horrible and painful after it was learned that the process took up to 30 minutes for the cyanide fumes to kill the condemned prisoner. That method quickly fell out of public favor—especially after the executions of Caryl Chessman and Barbara Graham in California’s infamous gas chamber. And the panacea of all execution methods, lethal injection, has proven to be the worst of the lot—a slow, paralyzing and suffocating death.

            Garland’s “truths” also deal with the polarizing issues of whether the death penalty does or does not work. He expresses pointed criticism of the argument that it does works with compelling statistics. First, let me say this: the death penalty works only in one provable context—the condemned man put to death will never kill again. But one cannot necessarily extrapolate from that into a supportable argument that his death will deter others from killing. As Garland pointed out, thousands of condemned prisoners are put to death in China and Singapore each year for a litany of offenses besides murder—and the fact that these countries still experience rampant crime despite their extreme use of the death penalty undermines its deterrent value.

            Garland said there were 14,000 homicides in this nation last year but there were only 106 death sentences imposed. Would 14,000 death sentences have changed the number of homicides this year? I doubt it. As Garland said, the average time it takes to execute a condemned inmate in this country is 12 years. There are approximately 3300 inmates on death rows in this country. 2200 of them, or 66 percent, will have their death sentences reduced on appeal. Still, it would still take more than three years to execute the remaining 1100 if one inmate were put to death each day. But there were just 52 condemned inmates put to death last year. At that rate it would take more than two decades to execute those 1100 remaining condemned inmates—not to mention all the new death sentences imposed each year which runs about 100.

            Garland’s “truths” make one thing evident: the death penalty as it is currently administered in this country will never be an effective punishment, much less a deterrent to crime. The penalty is irretrievably flawed with official whim and caprice, excessive costs, protracted delays, and a lack of moral will to carry it out swiftly and without public recriminations.

            Thus, its abolishment is the only practical solution for this nation’s criminal justice system–an argument that David Garland’s truths make quite convincingly.

         Let’s examine the bare facts of this case. By his own admission, Green was not a law-abiding citizen when he was arrested on the rape charge in 1983. He told Houston Chronicle reporter Mike Tolson (“Waking Up After a 27-Year Nightmare,” Aug. 1, 2010) that he spent his days playing video games and his nights stealing cars. It was that criminal lifestyle that put him in the proverbial “wrong place at the wrong time.”

          The Houston Chronicle in yet another report said that on April 18, 1983 a woman, who was talking to her husband on a pay telephone at a gas station, was abducted by two armed black men. They placed her in a stolen vehicle occupied by two other black men. She was taken to a remote location where she was brutally and repeatedly raped by three of the men.

          That same April night Green, who is black, was walking home with a Hispanic friend in the vicinity of where the woman had been raped. Police were stopping all black men in the area because they had earlier given chase to four black men in a stolen vehicle, but all had managed to bail out of the vehicle and get away from the cops. While one of the officers was talking to Green and the Hispanic man during the stop, he apparently received information about the rape which had just occurred. The rape victim was brought to the scene where she viewed Green and the other man as they sat in the back of a police unit. She could not identify either. The two men were released.

          A week after rape took place (April 25) Green was spotted by the police in a stolen vehicle. The officers gave chase. Green wrecked the vehicle but he managed to temporarily elude the officers until they found him hiding in a nearby garage.

         Detectives investigating the rape felt that a black man in a stolen vehicle, who had been in the vicinity of the rape scene on the night the crime occurred, was a sufficient basis to present a “photo array” lineup with Green’s photo in it to the rape victim. She identified Green as one of her assailants. Later that day Green was placed in a live lineup and was identified by the victim a second time.

         “When I was standing in the lineup, seven different women were brought in to look at us,” Green told Tolson. “Do you know how many of the others picked me as their rapist? Five. And the sixth said I might be. The only reason I did not get charged with those rapes is that I was in jail when they happened.”

         The only evidence we have that all these women misidentified Green is his statement to that effect. Tolson did not bother to “fact-check” the former inmate, or perhaps  reliable evidence was not available for an accurate fact-checking.

         It doesn’t matter.  I personally don’t believe those five rape victims misidentified Green as their attacker. Here again the anger issue comes into play. Green told Tolson that he was extremely angry when the gang-rape victim misidentified him and that he later spat in the face of one of the detectives involved in the case. That’s pretty good evidence of uncontrollable anger. He went to prison with that same mean attitude. He took up the study of law, became of “jailhouse lawyer” of sorts, and embraced the inmate value system which subscribes to the conspiratorial notion that the “system is fucked up” and out to get every poor, disadvantaged person in the country. The five misidentifications claim is, I believe, a “cellblock story” created—and repeated so much that it attained truth in Green’s mind—to enhance Green’s “creds” as a “victim” in the inmate community and to prove just how “fucked up” the system really is.

         Then Green caught a break. The very system that is so “fucked up”—in this instance, the District Attorney’s Office Post Conviction Review Section—began looking into his case. It did not take long for the investigation, involving DNA evidence whose testing was not available in 1983, to not only clear Green in the gang-rape case but pinpoint the real assailants. While Green’s DNA was not found in the victim’s jeans worn the night of the sexual assault, which alone was not enough to establish his actual innocence, the fact that DA’s office identified the real attackers was more than enough to conclude Green was actually innocent of participating in the 1983 gang-rape.

         So, in effect, the same District Attorney’s Office which had wrongfully convicted Green went the extra mile to exonerate him. District Attorney Pat Lykos could have done what other district attorneys have done. She could have tested the victim’s jeans, discovered no incriminating DNA against Green, and but still concluded that that was not enough to establish his actual innocence. She did not do that. She identified the real assailants and owned up to Green’s wrongful conviction.

         And while Green credited the District Attorney’s Office for his exoneration, the day before his actual release from custody he made a real ass of himself in a holding cell adjacent to the courtroom. He did not want to wear handcuffs and leg irons into the courtroom for a hearing at which he would have been released on bond. He got embroiled in a shouting, cursing, and reported threatening incident with one of the escort deputies about the handcuffs/leg irons security protocol. With all his family and friends waiting inside the courthouse, the judge was forced to postpone the bail hearing to give Green an opportunity to “cool down.”

        Green’s attorney, family, and supporters gathered outside the courthouse immediately justified the inmate’s angry outburst as a natural, even inevitable response by someone who has spent 27 years in prison for something he didn’t do. Houston Chronicle columnist Rick Casey went so far as to say that not only should Green not have been subjected to any security protocols but that Harris County officials should have put him up in a local hotel pending the bail hearing.

         I’m not buying spoiled fruit from that marketplace. Green has obvious anger issues about the wrong done to him. The last thing he needs is a network of supporters offering excuses and justifications as a license for his anger. Granted, Michael Anthony Green has a right to be pissed but he does not own a license to impose that anger on the rest of the world. You piss in the toilet, not in the public square. For example, on the day he was released from custody, Green expressed these hostile sentiment to the media about the gang-rape victim: “She knew I wasn’t the guy. She shouldn’t have picked me. She said it wasn’t me a week earlier.”

         A wrong eyewitness identification is called a “mistaken” identification. It is not called a “deliberate misidentification.” Green would have us believe this rape victim deliberately misidentified him. Why would she do such a dastardly thing? The fact is that she didn’t. I do believe, however, she was influenced by police misconduct to identify Green but it’s irresponsible to charge that she methodically set out to misidentify Green. She wanted her assailants caught and sent to prison. She gained absolutely nothing by sending an “innocent” man to prison.

         That’s not the way Green sees it. He added this criticism in the media about the victim: “I don’t want to hear excuses. Are you saying that if someone robs you, because the cops keep putting my picture in front of you, that’s going to make you pick me? That does not justify her actions.”

         Obviously prison rot is still affecting Green’s thought processes. That’s exactly why the victim misidentified him—police misconduct. And if he has a beef with anyone, it’s the detectives who engaged in the misconduct and the prosecutors from District Attorney Johnny Holmes’ office who sanctioned that misconduct. He should take his anger and frustration out on them. The victim was abducted at gunpoint, taken to an isolated area, and repeatedly gang raped by car thieves. She was that night, and forever will be, a tragic victim. She believed in the police. Why wouldn’t she? Her entire life experience had taught her that she could trust the police. They lied to and manipulated her for their own self-serving law enforcement interests. So this victim has nothing to apologize for—my God, she’s been victimized twice here: once by her brutal attackers and again by an illegal process that made her identify the wrong man. Now she has to live the rest of her life with both regrets: the horrible rape and the mistaken identification she made.

         Michael Anthony Green needs to get down off the high horse of angry indignation and leave the victim alone. He also needs to own up to the fact that he bears some contributory negligence for what happened to him in April 1983: he was a petty thief, stealing other people’s car and who knows what else. He put himself in that “wrong place at the wrong time.” Had he not been driving that stolen car, he would not have been arrested and his mugshot would not have been shown to the victim.

         I offer this advice to Michael Green: take the $80,000 payout for each of the 27 years you were wrongfully incarcerated and use it wisely to build a constructive, positive life. Turn loose the anger and quickly shed that self-destructive prison mindset. Use your new found “recognition” and wealth to help change the system that wronged you.

         But I don’t hold out much hope that my advice will be heeded. I suspect the criminal justice system will see Michael Anthony Green again—and not in a good way.

            But Californians still remain fairly split about whether they would impose the death sentence as opposed to a sentence of life without parole. 42 percent in the most recent poll said they preferred life w/o parole for first degree murder while 41 percent favored the death sentence. California’s inability to administer the death penalty with any degree of frequency has had an obvious impact the feelings of its citizens about the penalty. That is evident by the fact that ten years ago 44 percent of Californians favored the death penalty for first degree murder while 37 percent favored life w/o parole.

            While the fewest number of death sentences were handed down last year by juries in this country since 1973, according to the ACLU of Southern California, support for the death penalty has steadily increased in California over the past three decades. Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a death penalty advocacy group, told the SF Chronicle that the question about death and life w/o parole is misleading because those polled were asked to “choose a uniform punishment for all first-degree murderers.” Pointing out that Californians’ support for the death penalty “pretty stable,” he added that “the question is, do you favor the death for the worst murderers. Very few people want the death penalty for every first-degree murderer.”

            Stefanie Faucher, associate director of Death Penalty Focus, an anti-death penalty group, had a different take on the Field Poll results. “I think they reflect a growing preference for life without parole as an alternative,” she told the SF Chronicle. “It is more cost effective, is carried out more quickly and doesn’t drag victims through years of appeals.”

            The staggering costs of the death penalty is definitely giving life w/o parole greater momentum than the death penalty. Californians are now spending $137 million per year on the death penalty while Indiana citizens are paying ten times as much to convict someone for the death penalty as for life w/o parole convictions. These two states have carried a combined 43 executions since the restoration of the death penalty in this country in 1976. Texas, on the other hand, has executed 462 individuals since its first post-restoration execution in 1982.

            Texans clearly get “more bang for their buck” which probably explains why there is not much interest about death penalty costs in this state. The last major report on costs for the death penalty was in 1992—a report in the Dallas Morning News which found that Texans spend $2.3 million on each death penalty case: three times the amount it would cost to keep an inmate incarcerated for 40 years.

            People who support the death penalty but say “we can’t afford it” undermine the premise of their belief in the ultimate punishment. The taking of human life should not be conditioned on its cost-effectiveness. If economics were the overriding consideration in the death penalty debate, we could simply do what the Chinese previously did in putting people down: take them to a remote location immediately after a finding of guilt and put a .22 caliber bullet in the back of their head. Done deal. No debate. No legal entanglements. But our system of “checks and balances” has placed legal safeguards on the administration of the death penalty—and these safeguards are irrefutably expensive, and they are not going to get any less so.

            The harsh, even bitter reality is that it not only costs to execute but to incarcerate in this country. The numbers are staggering on both ends of the spectrum—death or incarceration. The alternative is the kind of social and political anarchy currently tearing Mexico asunder. Their situation has become so dire that the only solution now is a “police state” with state-sponsored death squads to kill off the drug barons. That nation’s fledgling democracy, albeit a notoriously corrupt one, has been destroyed by lawlessness. The only practical way to restore any semblance of social order and governmental control is through regimes like Saddam Hussein and Josip Broz Tito. There are no other legitimate democratic options. The only realistic option now is “turn the hounds loose.”

            Bottom line: the cost of law and order is expensive in a free democratic society like ours. While our criminal justice could certainly spend its massive expenditures more wisely, there is no way to cut the budget on crime prevention, especially in a society where crime is a growth industry. Belly up to the bar and pay the tab.

            Essentially what Grits n’ Casey are upset about is that the “public warning” administered to Keller by the13-member Commission was not severe enough. Out of one side of his mouth Casey called the warning a “historic slap on the wrist” while out of the other side of his mouth, in the very same breath, the anti-Keller columnist called it a “strongly worded condemnation.” What kind of double-speak is that? And Grits rambled on about the public warning, the second lowest sanction the Commission could have imposed according to Casey, being a “bad” precedent that would encourage other “misconducting” judges to fight their cases all the way through the judicial disciplinary process to secure the same kind of “special treatment” supposedly given to Judge Keller.

            Short of a public hanging, or perhaps a lesser public flogging, I don’t know what would satisfy the anti-Keller forces like Grits n’ Casey. I certainly support the right of Grits n’ Casey to pillory Judge Keller with the written word. That’s classic First Amendment stuff. But they’re burning the barn because the jackass escaped. There would be no “Keller debate” had the Texas Defender Service properly represented Michael Wayne Richard on his final appeal. Look, Richard was going to be executed: whether it was September 25, 2007 or September 25, 2009. The crime he committed etched his fate in death penalty stone.

            But the only reason Richard was executed on September 25, 2007 rather than September 25, 2009 was because his attorneys did not adequately and properly represent him on the last day of his life. Their actions, far more than Keller’s admitted failure to follow procedures, resulted in Richard’s untimely execution. All the criticism in the world against Sharon Keller is not going to undermine that fact. The anti-Keller forces can try, and may eventually succeed in removing the judge from the bench, but it shouldn’t be because of the Richard case.

            There have been some discreet and passing references about the failings of the Texas Defender Service in the Richard case but nothing comparable to the wide-ranging, far-flung criticism leveled against Keller. It’s politics in its rawest form—and debates on these kinds of issues should not be shaped by political perspectives. They should be waged and resolved on the basis of fact. And the fact is that the Texas Defender Service is the reason Michael Wayne Richard was executed on September 25, 2007, not Judge Sharon Keller.

            The murders remained unsolved for seven years. The only evidence left at the scene by the killer was a bloody handprint on the apartment’s doorknob. Jackson was linked to the crime in April 1995. He had been convicted and sentenced to 12 years for an armed robbery. Harris County law enforcement in 1995 had access to a new computer system that linked Jackson to the bloody handprint found at the Henderson/Wortenberry crime scene based on his 1995 fingerprints.

            Three years later a Harris County jury found Jackson guilty of the murders and sentenced him to death. Twelve years later Jackson was escorted into the Texas death chamber, and without saying a word or even acknowledging his own family members, he was put to death on the evening of July 20, 2010.

            This execution, I believe, should not have taken place for two reasons. First, Jackson maintained his innocence from the very beginning. And there were serious problems inherent in the way Jackson was convicted. In a 2007 report that heavily criticized the Houston Police Department’s troubled crime lab, Michael Bromwich, an independent investigator hired by former Mayor Bill White to review the crime lab’s operations, found that a technician had manipulated blood evidence to bolster homicide detectives’ case against another “prime” suspect at the time. That suspect had Type O blood while the bloody handprint found at the Henderson/Wortenberry crime scene was Type B blood. It was only after Jackson was arrested that the crime lab report was changed to reflect the Type B blood.

            During a death row interview with the Houston Chronicle several days before his execution, Jackson pointed to the botched blood evidence (as well as a number of mistakes by his defense attorneys) as the cause for his death sentence. “I don’t stay up at night and have nightmares,” Jackson told Chronicle reporter Allan Turner. “I had the fact that I’m being blamed and will be killed, but it’s more sadness than hate. Oh, life’s a bitch … It’s obvious I’m getting framed. I’m not your bad guy. People who know me know I’m a good guy.”

            But police and prosecutors paint a different picture of Jackson. They portrayed him as a predator who, as the Chronicle reported, “preyed on patrons of Montrose gay bars.”

            That brings me to the second reason why Jackson should not have been executed. Henderson reportedly met Jackson in a Montrose gay bar on the night of the murders and took the man home with him. Obviously, the “gay tenor” lived a risky life style. That by no means justified his horrible murder, but it was Henderson’s risky life style choice that caused the death of Alan Wortenberry who was recently divorced and living with Henderson as a “house guest” until he could get his life in order. Whether it was Jackson or someone else, Henderson brought a killer back to his apartment, ostensibly for a sexual encounter. Wortenberry had nothing to do with that choice. He was simply at the apartment when Henderson returned with the killer that robbed both men and brutally took their lives.

            Carl Wortenberry, Alan’s father, is a retired library director for Fort Worth. He attended Jackson’s execution. “When you come to the personal aspect of it,” he told the Chronicle before the Jackson’s execution, “pure logic says for someone to do a crime of this nature, unprovoked—Alan was in the wrong place at the wrong time—it’s hard for me to think the death penalty is unjustified.”

            But that’s part of the problem I have about Jackson’s execution. It was Wortenberry murder, a second killing, that made it a capital offense. A jury probably would not have returned a death penalty had Jackson simply killed Henderson. These kinds of cases rarely ever result in a death penalty verdict.

            And who is really responsible for Alan Wortenberry’s murder? The killer to begin with, but the killer would not have been in Henderson’s apartment had the gay opera tenor not made a risky life style choice to pick up a stranger and return home with him for sex. The killer had no premeditated intent to kill Alan Wortenberry. As his father pointed out, Alan was tragically in the wrong place at the wrong time. He died not because the killer went to the apartment intending to kill him but because Henderson, a friend, made horribly misguided decision to invite the killer in.

            The “Grand Opera Murder case” was a problem from the beginning. One gets the feeling that a lot of people simply wanted Jackson done away with so the case could finally be put to rest. If that is truly the case, then those people got what they wanted.

            The day before Abigail Young’s conviction was reported in the Chronicle, the newspaper carried another “front page” story about a 35-year-old father named Alex McGowen Duncan who beat his six-year-old son, Tekerrious Jackson, to death because the child wouldn’t fall asleep. The beating was so horrific that the medical examiner’s office would later compare the child’s injuries to those incurred in car accidents. Sgt. Brian Harris, a detective with the Houston Police Department Homicide Division, told the Chronicle: “The saddest thing is, that because of the unconditional love he had for his father, the child would often tell him, ‘I love you daddy.’”

            How could a mother let some low-life boyfriend rape and beat her child to death?

            How could a father force his son to get on his knees, make him raise his hands above his head, and repeatedly punch the child in the chest until he killed him, just because the child wouldn’t go to sleep?

            Lucas Coe is awaiting trial for the rape of little Emma. He will not even be tried for her murder. Sure, he will get life but not for killing the child—which he surely did. No one will be held responsible for the murder of little Emma. The sorry-ass mother walked away with a conviction for “reckless bodily injury.” I wonder what kind of verdict the jury would have returned had they been subjected to the same terrible physical and sexual abuse Coe put Emma through. It makes your heart want to say, “get the fucking rope”—not just for Coe and Young but also for that irresponsible jurors who placed absolutely no value on Emma’s life with their tragic “reckless bodily injury” verdict.

            And as for the scumbag Duncan, he will never see death row either. When all is said and done, the district attorney’s office will let him plead down to a reduced charge. He may spend the rest of his life in prison—and the only hope is that he does not know “how to do time” and will be the target of the same kind of physical abuse he inflicted on his son by some vengeful cons.

            There is nothing “good” about the taking of human life—not even in war or self-defense. Sometimes events in life make it necessary, both for a country and the individual. But that doesn’t make it good. And, then, there are “evil” people who take human life as casually as one takes a piss: serial killers, terrorists, gang-bangers, drug dealers, and contract killers. But none of these people compare on my scale of evil to parents who kill their own children, often with years of physical and sexual abuse before death finally gives the children a permanent reprieve.

            Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who was a famed liberal activist and death penalty opponent, once said that the only fair way to carry out the death penalty would be to place a chair in the public square and every time someone killed put them in the chair and put a bullet in their head. Keep repeated the process until there were no murders in the community of man.

            I agree. But I would take it a step farther. Place all the parents who kill their children at the front of the line. You visit any death row in this country and you will find very few parents there for killing their children. This despite the fact that, according to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, nearly 2000 children die each year because of abuse and neglect—almost all of it inflicted by natural parents.

            So don’t look to me for sympathy for people like Abigail Young and Alex Duncan—I only hope that if Hell does exist, they will have front row seat for eternity sitting next to each other “suffering for their sins.”