Troy Davis : Forgotten Already?

As we move on with our lives, we often forget so quickly what was only yesterday, the biggest story in the country. Troy Davis is the perfect example of that. The TV coverage ended a few hours after Troy Davis was pronounced dead. The newspapers all reported the story the next day. And for most, that was the end of the story.
That is not good enough for me. I can't just forget Troy Davis and move on with my life. His death should not be in vain.
I won't profess Troy Davis's innocence. I won't claim that he was even a good person. Understand, I am not saying that he was either innocent or guilty nor good or bad. What I am saying is that for the purposes of my point, it is irrelevant.

Did we murder an innocent man?

Over the last few weeks I have been watching the Republican presidential debates. I watched as Republican frontrunner, Texas Governor Rick Perry proudly boasted Texas's nation leading number of executions as a Tea Party crowd roared in support. I watched as Ron Paul said that an uninsured 30 year old should be left to die because he can't pay his medical bills. I watched as no one on the stage took an opportunity to disagree. Then I watched as a man who may or may not have committed a murder struggled for his life and lost.
I didn't know Troy Davis. I never spoke to him. I don't know whether or not he did in fact murder officer Mark MacPhail. What I do know is that there are likely two or three people who do know for sure. One is Troy Davis. He is in fact the only person who truly knows for sure. The second is Officer MacPhail. The third would be someone else if in fact they and not Troy Davis committed this horrific crime. What I also know is that there is a chance that the state of Georgia executed an innocent man. I know that in a country that is the world's beacon of freedom and prosperity, that should never happen.
NEVER AGAIN should we take the life of a person who we are not certain committed the crime for which they are being executed. We have the best court system in the world. Our burden of proof, "beyond a reasonable doubt" is in place to protect the innocent at the expense of possibly not convicting the guilty. But our system is not perfect. We have wrongfully convicted thousands of people for a multitude of crimes. We have executed people that we now know to be innocent. How is it than in a country that prides itself on the best justice system in the world, we murder innocent people by government sanction? Make no mistake about it, the deliberate taking of an innocent person's life is murder. The fact that we don't know for sure that they are guilty is exactly why it should never happen.
In the case of Troy Davis, I never heard a cry for him to be released from prison. I only heard a cry for his life to be spared in the interest of ensuring that an innocent man was not murdered.
Though our country faces difficult times, I can't help but enjoy certain social progress that has taken place. The one area that there seems to be little progress in is capital punishment. It is time for it to be made an issue.

Have we forgotten the words of our founding fathers?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

What ever happened to that? What ever happened to life being a right that was unalienable?
It is time for us to decide that we as a nation value the life of one innocent person more than the death of one guilty person. It is time that we remove the arbitrary standards for the death penalty (none of which include certain guilt) from the books. It is time that we air on the side of life over the side of vengeance.
After reading this, you may never hear the name Troy Davis again. But Troy Davis's own story is not about Troy Davis. It is about a system which fails to properly protect justice for the innocent. Troy Davis is gone. We can't bring him back. And that is the whole point. Put an innocent man in prison for life, and he still has just that, his life. He has the hope that he will one day experience the freedom that he deserves. Put an innocent man to death and he has nothing. Nothing but the torture that led to his execution for a crime that he knows he did not commit. There is only one word that I can think of to describe the premeditated killing of an innocent person - MURDER.
Let us never again allow government to sanction murder.

A risk that YOU are willing to take?