Troy Davis Execution Stayed

11th Circuit Stays Execution in Georgia Killing
Greg Bluestein
The Associated Press
October 27, 2008
A federal appeals court gave a late reprieve Friday to a Georgia man set to be executed for the 1989 killing of an off-duty police officer in a case in which several witnesses have changed their accounts of the crime.
Troy Davis, 40, was scheduled to be executed Monday for the murder of Savannah police Officer Mark MacPhail. But the three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the execution and ordered his attorneys to prove whether he can meet "stringent requirements" to press his appeal.
Davis' supporters have called for a new trial because seven of the nine key witnesses against him have recanted their testimony, and the doubts about his guilt have won him the support of former President Jimmy Carter and other prominent advocates.
It was the third time since July 2007 that Davis has been spared the death penalty by a late court decision.
"I'm ecstatic. This movement is building and building and building," said Martina Correia, Davis' sister. "This is going to crumble the justice system in Georgia if they don't do the right thing."
The victim's family was distraught by the news of the decision.
"For 17 years, this has been hanging over us. It needs to be finished," said Anneliese MacPhail, the slain officer's 75-year-old mother. "I'm very disappointed, upset, angry. Just put it all together. I cannot believe this is happening again."
[...] But Davis' lawyers say new evidence proves their client was a victim of mistaken identity. Besides those who have recanted their testimony, three others who did not testify have said Sylvester "Red" Coles -- who testified against Davis at his trial -- confessed to the killing.
Coles refused to talk about the case when contacted by The Associated Press during a 2007 court appearance and has no listed phone number.
[...] Savannah District Attorney Spencer Lawton also said he doubts the new testimony meets the legal standards for a new trial. And while the recantations may seem persuasive to some, Lawton said, "to others of us it invites a suggestion of manipulation, making it very difficult to believe."
Davis was set to be executed in July 2007, but Georgia's pardons board postponed the execution less than 24 hours before it was to be carried out.
[...] Then, two hours before his scheduled Sept. 23 execution, the Supreme Court issued a stay, sparking a celebration among Davis' supporters gathered outside the state prison. A few weeks later, though, the high court cleared the way for the execution when it decided not to give Davis another hearing.
As their legal options dwindled, Davis' attorneys appealed to the 11th Circuit Court. In a brief filed Wednesday, they claimed the execution was "constitutionally intolerable" and asked the court to delay the execution to pursue claims Davis is innocent.
The court on Friday gave defense attorneys 15 days to file a legal brief on their arguments.
A death penalty expert said the court's decision was surprising.
"This is extraordinarily rare. The law is very demanding and the Court of Appeals is a very conservative court," said Stephen Bright, a death penalty expert who is the head of the Southern Center for Human Rights. "It's just not something that one would expect from this court." [...]
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202425548076

Stop State Sponsored Murder

The state of Georgia and the Supreme Court are about to murder an innocent man. It will come as no surprise that this man is a working class African American. Democracy Now! has covered this story in great detail, which you can find here (http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2008925amy_goodmans_new_column_troy_davis_and_the_supreme_decision). Today, the European Parliament condemned it (see AP story below). Remember: A rich, white man has NEVER been executed by the state in America!

Rally For Troy Davis

Thursday, October 23 5:30 p.m.
33rd Street and 8th Avenue, (SE corner)
New York City, NY

Stand Firm For Justice! Rally For Troy Davis In New York City

Join fellow activists in a rally to demand justice for Troy Davis

On Oct 14 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Troy Davis?s petition and the State of Georgia has set an execution date of October 27, ignoring overwhelming evidence of his innocence. People throughout the United States are seriously disturbed by the thought of a possibly innocent man being executed. Nothing can undermine public faith in a criminal justice system faster than an execution when there are still serious doubts about guilt.

Join fellow New Yorkers on Thursday Oct. 23 as we call for the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant justice to Troy Davis and stop his execution.

For more information contact Alyce Stark, asce4@earthlink.net or Jamie Wood, jwood@aiusa.org

http://www.amnestyusa.org/events/northeast/october-23-rally-for-troy-davis-in-new-york-city/page.do?id=1091898

Here is the AP story:

EU legislature protests US death sentence

2 hours ago

STRASBOURG, France (AP) — The European parliament is strongly protesting plans to execute a man in the United States who has been sentenced to death for killing a police officer.

Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed in Georgia on Oct. 27, despite calls from his supporters to reconsider because seven of nine key witnesses against him have recanted their testimony. [my bold]

EU parliament head Hans-Gert Poettering says all executions are violations of human rights. He says the condemned American symbolizes the fate of all death row inmates, and vows the EU legislature "will fight against the death penalty under any circumstances everywhere in the world."

The 40-year-old Davis was sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of 27-year-old Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail. His case has also attracted support from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jL2z4O3e7QjA1_VrRlYg0ynDmGSAD93VH4NG0

Taking Control

I must introduce this by apologizing to David Swanson for limiting his excellent essay for this blog. Please follow up and read the entire thing by clicking on the link below:

Sweeping Astroturf

By David Swanson

Imagine for a second that it's November 5th, and the Democrats are set to control both houses of Congress and the White House. Perhaps they even control 60 Senate seats, making Republican filibusters impossible. Now what?

For the past two years, numerous activist groups have opposed the demands of their own members by arguing that the Democrats were helpless. They couldn't get past filibusters or vetoes, and were therefore as impotent as newborn babes.

[...] While you can't get any results from watering or fertilizing astroturf, you can sweep it. If the Democrats take both houses of Congress and the White House, and especially if they take 60 senate seats, their principal recent excuses for all variety of crimes of both omission and commission will vanish. Accomplishing this with margins of victory too large to plausibly steal remains an uphill fight requiring full attention. And fighting election fraud, which is already almost openly underway, will require working on the behalf of candidates who will not lift a finger to help themselves. We need all hands on deck for this one for the next two weeks and possibly far beyond.

But come November 5th, pseudo-grassroots groups, also known as astroturf organizations will have to begin thinking hard about how they will relate to both their members and to a government swept by the party whose wishes they habitually defer to. With that in mind, here are my recommendations:

First, begin to think and act more in terms of individual representatives, senators, and president, and less in terms of party. [my bold] The health care plan we all favor, H.R. 676, has 94 cosponsors, and we are about to elect more. No longer can our silence on such legislation be justified by the need to elect someone other than McCain. We've already elected Obama. He's in the White House.

Second, begin to think in terms of Congress as the first branch of our government. [my bold] If we allow all power to continue to remain in the White House, we will be represented less well during the next four years, and all power will still remain in the White House when the next Republican lives there. We need to restore the power of the purse, the power of subpoena, the power to ratify or reject treaties, the power to legislate free of editing by "signing statement," and the power to begin and end wars. If we cannot restore those powers to the branch of our government they were supposed to belong to now, while we have the supposed people's party cooperatively running the Congress and the presidency, then when can we?

Third, clearly and publicly lay out the policy demands that you, as a legitimate activist organization, are making of our government, and do so in November. [my bold] [...]

We should demand an end to our imperial wars in the Middle East. This will have been the third consecutive election in which we voted for that change. If the will of the voters is matched by the official election outcomes, and if those outcomes remove the major recent excuses for inaction and regression, then it will be time for us to demand clearly what we, the people, the sovereigns of this nation, want. We don't want to reduce any occupations or move them anywhere else. We want our men and women brought home. Now.

We don't want to enlarge the world's largest military. We want to shrink it. We want to shift our resources to where they will do some good for people. We don't want to put our children into debt funding weapons, wars, or Wall Street. We want major investment in green energy, jobs, affordable housing, education, and foreign aid. And I mean major investment, with no excuses about the needs of poor struggling billionaires and arms dealers.

[...] Remove the cap on income taxed for Social Security. Remove the loopholes and tax corporations. Undo the Bush tax cuts for millionaires. Undo Paulson's Plunder. Tax financial transactions. End wars, and begin closing the 1,000 or so military bases we maintain to our great detriment in other people's nations around the world. [...]

We want the minimum wage made a living wage and indexed to the cost of living. We want the right to organize a labor union restored. We want corporate trade agreements shredded and new trade policies written to benefit people, not corporations. [...]

We also want money removed from politics. If a completely Democratic government does not create public financing and free air time for candidates, then they can drop all pretense that they want it. If they don't give the District of Columbia representation in Congress, then the people of DC should hear that message loud and clear. If the Democrats who constantly tell you they can't do things because they're afraid of the media are swept into power and refuse to break up the media cartel, we can henceforth assume they enjoy being afraid. And if they do not establish the right to vote and to have our votes openly counted, including universal registration, weekend elections, and on-site hand-counted paper ballots, we can henceforth assume winning didn't feel as good to them as it does to normal people.

We have an opportunity to either do great things or expose great flaws. We want war profiteers in prison, not just off our payroll. We want predatory lenders in prison, not multi-million-dollar public housing. We want torturers, war criminals, Richard B. Cheney, and George W. Bush prosecuted, imprisoned, and impeached. We want every future government to know that we are a nation of laws. If an election alone could communicate that to future tyrants, then the election of Jimmy Carter would have prevented the presidency of George W. Bush. [my bold]

We can't expect to accomplish everything we want by next spring or even in the space of four years, but if we are afraid to even articulate what we want, we will never begin to accomplish it.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36982

Judgement is Coming

Prosecuting Bush and Cheney
Submitted by David Swanson on Sun, 2008-08-03
Criminal Prosecution
Last week two judges encouraged me to look to courts to help us recover from the damage done by an outlaw executive and a spineless corrupt legislature. The first was Bush-appointed federal Judge John Bates who ruled that people must comply with Congressional subpoenas even if they used to work for the president, and this because - you know - the law requires it. The second was Judge William Price in Iowa who was hearing the case of citizens arrested for trying to make a citizens' arrest of Karl Rove. When told what they had been trying to do, the judge said "Well, it's about time!"
Sort of makes you want to go out and arrest a war criminal or two, doesn't it? Here's how.
Next month, on September 13th and 14th in Andover, Massachusetts, a major conference will be held to discuss the possibilities for prosecuting high-level American war criminals, including Bush and Cheney. The agenda and information on how to attend can be found at http://war-crimes.info.
A somewhat similar conference was held in Paris, France, in September 2005, organized by the Association for the Defence of International Humanitarian Law, France (ADIF) and the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH). The remarks of a long list of outstanding expert speakers have been updated, translated, and just published as "International Justice and Impunity: The Case of the United States," from Clarity Press.
It would be enlightening to many Americans to read this book, which documents the discussion of top proponents of human rights from around the world, including the United States -- a discussion focusing on the single biggest impediment to establishing the international rule of law, to eliminating war as an instrument of policy, and to defending human rights around the world, namely the fierce opposition of the U.S. government to all of the above.
Of course, the United States played a key role in creating the United Nations, in convening the tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo, in developing and promoting the ideas of human rights and international law. And, of course, the United States favors, to this day, the concept of international law as applied to the crimes of any nation other than the United States. But this two-tiered system in which the United States operates with a set of rules completely unlike those for everyone else is eroding support for the entire idea of law as something applicable to the actions of nations, rulers, and militaries.
As one example of the intense attack the Bush-Cheney White House has launched against international law, we can look at the case of Belgium, where the national government was developing the laws and practice needed to prosecute crimes against humanity whether or not related in any way to Belgium. But in May 2003 an attorney lodged a complaint on behalf of a number of Iraqi and Jordanian victims against U.S. General Tommy Franks and some members of his staff for war crimes in Iraq. The crimes included the bombing of civilian targets, the use of cluster bombs, and the targeting of the Palestine Hotel, which was known to house only journalists. The U.S. Congress quickly passed a law allowing the U.S. president to attack anyone (including Belgium) who would detain members of the U.S. military. The White House also told Belgium to drop the case and change the law that permitted it ever to be brought, or the headquarters of NATO would be moved to another country taking thousands of jobs with it. The law was changed and the case dropped before the US media ever mentioned it.
To learn much else that the US media doesn't tell you, read this book and go to http://convictbushcheney.org. At that site we are organizing ongoing activities and reporting on the possibilities for prosecuting members of Cheney-Bush Inc., through the International Criminal Court, through the courts of foreign countries, through the U.S. Department of Justice, and through state and local district attorneys. The purpose, of course, is not vengeance but deterrence, not retribution but justice for the sake of peace. The aim is not to disguise the complicity of so many thousands in the government and the military or to excuse the apathy of the public, but to begin a healing process by holding accountable the chief instigators of the worst crimes against the human race that we have seen in recent years. If we do not do so, all will fade into silence within the fragile bubble stretching from Atlantic to Pacific, while a raging storm of anger and resentment gathers into a global hurricane.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/35260

UK Site Sets Up Israeli Boycott

Unfortunately, the information below only applies to products sold in the United Kingdom. There are pages and pages of references and links to other sites, initiatives, educational sources, even a section providing a historical frame for the crises.
Keep an eye on the goods bar code:
Israel's country prefix is 729.
This website has been set up for two main purposes:
- To help people who want to boycott produce from Israel and illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, by providing sources of information about companies, products etc.
- To act as an educational resource... many people have not the foggiest idea of the war crimes, human rights abuses and flagrant breaches of international humanitarian law that are regularly committed by the Israeli Government and its armed forces (the IDF) in the what remains of Palestine. The many links on this page will lead you to valuable sources of information.
Lest there be any doubt on the subject, this site is not anti-Jewish. Many of the sites linked to on this page are run by Jews and/or Israeli citizens who are at the forefront of efforts to secure peace and justice in the Middle East. We are opposed to the Likud Government that is in power in Israel today, however we are not anti-Israel, on the contrary, we believe that it is only through the delivery of peace and justice for all citizens of the region that Israel can prosper in the long term.
As soon as Israel reaches a just peace with the Palestinian people within the framework of international law we will call an end to this boycott.
http://www.mylinkspage.com/israel.html
In fact, I've had my own ad hoc boycott going on for a while, but not regarding Israel. Whenever I start aimlessly browsing for things I probably don't need, I look at the label. If it says, Made in China, I say out loud--but not necessarily loudly, "Made in China," and put the object back. It's most effective if I keep my affect completely neutral. People haven't a clue what I'm doing or why, but they'll be thinking about it, especially next time there's a report about China and American debt.