Mark MacPhail

I am Mark MacPhail

Liberals are strange beings. They believe the government should control every aspect of your life to mileage your car gets out of a gallon of gasoline.The Left’s attitude changes 180 degrees; the government is wrong and racist and mean and hateful and wrong, wrong wrong.

Consider the “I Am Troy Davis” maniacs out there.

Where are the “I am Mark MacPhail” T-shirts?

On August 19, 1989, Troy Davis shot and killed Mark Allen MacPhail Sr., 27, an officer with the Savannah Police Department who was working a second job as a guard at a local Burger King. He left behind a wife, a 1-year-old daughter, and a son. He would have been 49 and nearing retirement. He was a military veteran as well.

On Wednesday, Georgia finally got around to executing Troy Davis. As Toby Harnden of the Telegraph reported: “A jury of seven blacks and five whites found that Davis, who had a street name of Rah, standing for Rough As Hell, had been pistol-whipping a homeless man in a Burger King had shot MacPhail dead when he intervened.”

The American government gave Troy Davis every avenue possible to appeal his conviction — and even invented a few for him. Toby Harnden wrote: “The current Supreme Court contains four liberal judges, none of whom issued a dissent in the Davis case. Two of them were appointed by Mr. Obama who, incidentally. Another justice, Clarence Thomas, is a black man from Georgia.”

Yet we have the New York Times condemning this execution as unjust. Not only does this nonsense run in its editorials, but the New York Times gave space for Ross Douthat to spread his ignorance: “It’s easy to see why the case of Troy Davis, the Georgia man executed last week for the 1989 killing of an off-duty police officer, became a cause célèbre for death penalty opponents. Davis was identified as the shooter by witnesses who later claimed to have been coerced by investigators. He was prosecuted and convicted based on the same dubious eyewitness testimony, rather than forensic evidence. And his appeals process managed to be ponderously slow without delivering anything like certainty: it took the courts 20 years to say a final no to the second trial that Davis may well have deserved.”

Actually, it is not easy to see why this became “a cause célèbre.” There was forensic evidence. The appellate court system is designed to be “ponderously slow” in favor of the accused. We do not go off and just kill people. This is not a nation of Troy Davises that pistol-whips winos and then shoots anyone who tries to interfere.

Crowd will never admit that the criminal justice system is fair and impartial and it works. We bend over backwards to ensure that innocent men are not locked up. The system is not perfect, but given the high recidivism rate for parolees and the like, I would say we are more likely to err on the side of letting 100 guilty men go free than allowing an innocent man to be locked up.

Smitty at The Other McCain quoted Ann Althouse: “I’ve never understood why people who don’t trust convictions agonize over the death penalty but blandly accept life imprisonment.” Smitty gave three reasons, except the obvious one: The “I Am Troy Davis” crowd knows Troy Davis is guilty as sin. They just want to plea him down.