MEDIA ROOTS- In 2007, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles stated that Troy Davis, a man charged with killing a police officer in 1991, would never be put to death unless there was “no doubt” of his guilt. Despite a cloud of uncertainty surrounding the case and a lack of hard evidence linking him to the actual killing, Troy Davis was executed last night by lethal injection at 11:08 EST while the world watched in horror. 

No matter what opinion one holds on the death penalty, it is worth noting that over 130 people on death row have been exonerated through DNA evidence that proved their wrongful convictions. Taking that statistic into consideration, it’s likely that people have already been put to death by the state who were not guilty of their crime.

Besides the disturbing fact that innocent people have been placed on death row before, the death penalty judicial process is extremely costly to taxpayers. In CA, taxpayers pay $90,000 more annually per death row prisoner than those regularly incarcerated. Furthermore, the appeals process usually takes decades to complete while death row inmates are held in conditions tantamount to solitary confinement.

Personally, I don’t support the death penalty. There is no ‘humane’ way to kill someone, and I think the process of executing a prisoner by any means is barbaric– especially in front of an audience. More importantly, I would rather have a murderer live out the rest of their life than to risk (literally) sponsoring the murder of one innocent person.

The murder of an alleged killer might be a gratifying moment of closure for the victim’s family members, but it will never fill the void left from losing a loved one. Instead, it will only fuel a vicious cycle of vengeance and hate.

Abby Martin

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For those who think the execution was justified, read the following reasons why the case wasn’t cut and dry via THE GUARDIAN:

1. Of the nine witnesses who appeared at Davis’s 1991 trial who said they had seen Davis beating up a homeless man in a dispute over a bottle of beer and then shooting to death a police officer, Mark MacPhail, who was acting as a good samaritan, seven have since recanted their evidence.

2. One of those who recanted, Antoine Williams, subsequently revealed they had no idea who shot the officer and that they were illiterate – meaning they could not read the police statements that they had signed at the time of the murder in 1989. Others said they had falsely testified that they had overheard Davis confess to the murder.

3. Many of those who retracted their evidence said that they had been cajoled by police into testifying against Davis. Some said they had been threatened with being put on trial themselves if they did not co-operate.

4. Of the two of the nine key witnesses who have not changed their story publicly, one has kept silent for the past 20 years and refuses to talk, and the other is Sylvester Coles. Coles was the man who first came forward to police and implicated Davis as the killer. But over the past 20 years evidence has grown that Coles himself may be the gunman and that he was fingering Davis to save his own skin.

5. In total, nine people have come forward with evidence that implicates Coles. Most recently, on Monday the George Board of Pardons and Paroles heard from Quiana Glover who told the panel that in June 2009 she had heard Coles, who had been drinking heavily, confess to the murder of MacPhail.

6. Apart from the witness evidence, most of which has since been cast into doubt, there was no forensic evidence gathered that links Davis to the killing.

7. In particular, there is no DNA evidence of any sort. The human rights group the Constitution Project points out that three-quarters of those prisoners who have been exonerated and declared innocent in the US were convicted at least in part on the basis of faulty eyewitness testimony.

8. No gun was ever found connected to the murder. Coles later admitted that he owned the same type of .38-calibre gun that had delivered the fatal bullets, but that he had given it away to another man earlier on the night of the shooting.

9. Higher courts in the US have repeatedly refused to grant Davis a retrial on the grounds that he had failed to “prove his innocence”. His supporters counter that where the ultimate penalty is at stake, it should be for the courts to be beyond any reasonable doubt of his guilt.

10. Even if you set aside the issue of Davis’s innocence or guilt, the manner of his execution tonight is cruel and unnatural. If the execution goes ahead as expected, it would be the fourth scheduled execution date for this prisoner. In 2008 he was given a stay just 90 minutes before he was set to die. Experts in death row say such multiple experiences with imminent death is tantamount to torture.

© 2011 Guardian

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DEMOCRACY NOW– Troy Anthony Davis was killed by lethal injection by the state of Georgia at At 11:08 p.m. EDT despite widespread doubts about his guilt. The execution occurred shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop the execution. Democracy Now! was the only news outlet to continuously broadcast live from the prison grounds last night where hundreds of supporters Troy Davis held an all-day vigil in Jackson, Ga.

Today we hear the voices of Troy Davis’ sister Martina Correia, hip-hop artist Big Boi, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, Ed DuBose of the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, two members of the Troy Davis legal team, and more. We also hear from journalist Jon Lewis, a witness to the execution: “[Davis] said to the family [of slain police officer Mark MacPhail] that he was sorry for their loss, but also said that he did not take their son, father, brother. He said to them to dig deeper into this case, to find out the truth. And then he said to the prison staff — the ones he said, ‘who are going to take my life,’ — he said to them, ‘may God have mercy on your souls,’ and his last words were to them, ‘may God bless your souls.'”

Democracy Now Special Report on Troy Davis Execution: Did Georgia Kill an Innocent Man? 1/2

Democracy Now Special Report on Troy Davis Execution: Did Georgia Kill an Innocent Man? 2/2

Russia Today covers the outrage surrounding Troy Davis’s death on the day of his execution.

More information about abolishing the death penalty: http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty

Photo by Flickr user 4WardEverUK 

MEDIA ROOTS- Project Censored spoke about corporate media censorship, managed news and the media blackout surrounding 9/11 at Oakland’s anniversary film festival on September 8, 2011. Watch the powerful talks by Mickey Huff, Director of Project Censored, and Peter Phillips.

Mickey Huff, Director of Project Censored, gives a poignant, powerful talk.

Peter Phillips, former Director of Project Censored, moved the room with this speech.

Learn more at www.projectcensored.org

Photo by Flickr User Meredith Farmer

MEDIA ROOTS- John Dau is one of Sudan’s Lost Boys, a group of more than 20,000 boys who escaped the genocide during the Sudanese Civil War, where 2.5 million Southern Sudanese were killed and millions of others were displaced. John gives Media Roots a moving account of his escape, his life growing up in the refugee camps, his experience coming to America for the first time and his work with the John Dau Foundation, where he established the first comprehensive & sustainable community medical clinic in his home village of Duk Payuel.

 Interview with John Dau conducted, produced and edited by Abby Martin 

Trailer for National Geographic’s award winning documentary called ‘God Grew Tired of Us’, based on John Dau’s story. Check out more about the film at http://www.godgrewtiredofus.com/

Learn more about the John Dau Foundation and how to help at http://johndaufoundation.org/

MEDIA ROOTS- Forty years ago, Finland began transforming its educational system to a more personalized methodology of teacher to student learning as part of the government’s economic recovery plan. Finland’s youth has since shot up to the highest in the world in reading, math and science skills.

Conversely, America’s impersonal initiation of marketplace competition into its educational system has caused the US to fall behind.

According to AFP:

The three-yearly OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.

Although Obama has slammed his predecessor’s controversial ‘No Child Left Behind’ legislation, he has implemented the same broken concept of a standards based education reform into his administration’s ‘Race to the Top’ policy.

Diane Ravitch, educational policy analyst and former US Assistant Secretary of Education, claims that President Obama’s ‘Race to the Top’ program will further weaken the country’s education process by embracing the following key elements: regular teacher evaluations in accordance with students’ test scores, privatizing schools with low test scores, mass firings in low-performing schools and making states compete for federal money with test ratings.

This current educational model of standardization is inherently flawed. By basing a complete faith in standardized testing statistics to determine the competence of teachers and abilities of children, there is a human element eliminated from the equation– an element that Finland has incorporated as the main pillar of their education strategy.

The Smithsonian sheds some light on Finland’s educational success:

Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else…

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians…

Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.

Furthermore, the solutions posed by ‘Race to the Top’ to improve education will result in private entities looting the system, revealing more collusion between private interests and politicians. In an egregious grab to profit off the public sector, hedge funds along with billionaire Bill Gates have initiated a massive PR push to privatize education, and their campaign has paid off– ‘Race to the Top’ calls for a dramatic expansion of privately owned charter schools.

Robert Cruickshank of the California Progress Report explains the motivation:

They’re engaged in a process of rent seeking, which has no productive value. By taking tax dollars that currently provide public services and channeling them to the private sector, which contracts to provide the service at lower cost – and therefore at lower quality – these wealthy individuals can add new income streams while also blunting any effort to raise their taxes to provide these services.

The trajectory of education in this country is drastically off course.  Human beings are complex creatures and learning isn’t black and white; some of us are brilliant in ways that cannot be expressed through multiple choice answers. Instead of penalizing teachers for low test scores, teachers should be encouraged to develop alternative teaching methods based on students’ differing needs.

To learn more about the education policy and ‘Race to the Top’, check out a recent Project Censored KPFA radio show on the framing of education reform. My news report on the show starts at 8:25.

Written by Abby Martin

Photo by Brett Smith

MEDIA ROOTS- Humanity could be about to witness an incredible, apocalyptic spectacle– the earth could temporarily be getting a second sun, if one of the brightest night’s stars explodes and becomes super-nova, as predicted by astronomers. Huffington Post reports on the potential scenario and explores other possible outcomes.

Abby

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THE HUFFINGTON POST– Dr. Brad Carter, Senior Lecturer of Physics at the University of Southern Queensland, outlined the scenario. Betelgeuse, one of the night sky’s brightest stars, is losing mass, indicating it is collapsing. It could run out of fuel and go super-nova at any time.

When that happens, for at least a few weeks, we’d see a second sun, Carter says. There may also be no night during that timeframe.

The Star Wars-esque scenario could happen by 2012, Carter says… or it could take longer. The explosion could also cause a neutron star or result in the formation of a black hole 1300 light years from Earth, reports news.com.au.

But doomsday sayers should be careful about speculation on this one. If the star does go super-nova, Earth will be showered with harmless particles, according to Carter. “They will flood through the Earth and bizarrely enough, even though the supernova we see visually will light up the night sky, 99 per cent of the energy in the supernova is released in these particles that will come through our bodies and through the Earth with absolutely no harm whatsoever,” he told news.com.au.

Read more about Two Suns? Twin Stars Could Be Visible From Earth By 2012

© 2011 The Huffington Post

Photo by Flickr user framboise