The Beautiful Impartiality of Our Political Disease

by: Jacob Freeze

Wed Aug 19, 2009 at 20:00

This proposition is easy enough to illustrate with the progressive icon Amy Goodman, who has already over-ruled a whole bevy of state and federal judges and only accidentally aligned herself with the United States Supreme Court in the case of Troy Davis.

Ms. Goodman's "brief" for Troy Davis is a fun-house mirror-image of David Addington and John Yoo arguing for extra-legal detention and torture of suspected terrorists "for the higher good," and I am also in favor of "the higher good" and would be happy to substitute my own plausible arguments about "the higher good" not only for our system of criminal justice but even more so for our foreign policy and national security apparatus.

But unfortunately my idea of "the higher good" isn't quite universal, and when David Addington and John Yoo and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush decide to substitute their idea of "the higher good" not only for my idea of "the higher good, but also for the rule of law, I want to appeal to something besides an infinite variety of interpretations of "the higher good," and what might that be?

Common sense? Kant? Jesus? Confucius? Chairman Mao? Zeus? Ahura Mazda? Lao-Tzu? The Prophet Mohammed? Ayatollah Khamenei? The Pope? The Southern Baptist Convention? Saint Paul? John Rawls? Bertrand Russell? Albert Camus? Sartre? Socrates? Kierkegaard? Arne Næss? Jonathan Edwards? John Winthrop? Moses? Isaiah? St. Francis of Assisi? Mary Baker Eddy? Fidel Castro? Pol Pot? Lenin? Marx? Adam Smith? Brigham Young? Martin Luther? Gandhi? Shabbetai Tzevi? Al Mahdi? Krishna? Abraham Lincoln? Baha'u'llah? The Bab? The Dalai Lama? Max Weber? Mahavira? Savonarola? Albert Schweizer? Osama bin Laden? Jerry Falwell? Leo Tolstoy? Martin Luther King? John Calvin? Adolf Hitler? Martin Buber? Billy Graham? Ronald Reagan? Li Hongzhi?

Amy Goodman?

Anyone who doubts that Amy Goodman wants to do the right thing is probably insane, but she doesn't make much more of a case for Troy Davis than John Yoo and David Addington made for torture and the "unitary executive," and the first block of testimony Ms. Goodman presents in favor of retrying Mr. Davis is just a rant by his sister Martina Correia, beginning with a discussion of the witnesses against her brother who have subsequently recanted their testimony...

"These people were easily manipulated. They built this case around Troy with no physical evidence, no DNA. And what they did is they ran on the excitement and the adrenaline that we have to get somebody for this police officer's murder, we have to appease community. And, you know, it got to the point where they were attacking so many black men that it's like any black man will do. And when Sylvester Coles came and pointed at Troy, everything dropped, and they just built a case around Troy."

Leaving aside Ms. Correia's correct assertion that no DNA evidence connected her brother with a shooting in a parking lot, we arrive at her analysis of police psychology...

...we have to get somebody for this police officer's murder, we have to appease community.

Ms. Correia would have to be a very gifted telepath indeed to see so clearly into the souls of all the detectives investigating the murder of their brother office Mark MacPhail, but apart from serving as the source of any number of sad jokes, the only real question about Ms. Correia's testimonial is...

Why did Amy Goodman publish so much nonsense by a supremely prejudiced witness who had even accompanied her accused brother when he fled the jurisdiction of the shooting to avoid prosecution?

I don't care.

The middle-brow Ms. Goodman's appeal to her middle-brow audience has just about the same cultural depth as the plastic Burger King who attracts a susceptible demographic into the parking lot where this whole mess began...

But behind Ms. Goodman's shallow but probably righteous outrage about the apparently "innocent" Troy Davis, the same systematic disrespect for the rule of law, which only recently expressed itself in a flood of Leftist support for the Honduran dictator-in-the-making Manuel Zelaya, who was busy enforcing his own idea of "the higher good" in contravention of the Supreme Court, Congress, Attorney General, federal elections commission and constitution of Honduras...

The same systematic disrespect for the rule of law now resurfaces all over the American Left as it proclaims its superior perspicuity about guilt and innocence above all courts and legal procedures.

So many witnesses who apparently gave false testimony in a capital murder case, for reasons known only to themselves, have now recanted their criminal misrepresentations, once again for reasons known only to themselves, and Ms. Goodman provides a brilliant specimen of so many bums and liars...  

Jeffrey Sapp is typical of those in the case who recanted their eyewitness testimony. He said in an affidavit:

"The police ... put a lot of pressure on me to say 'Troy said this' or 'Troy said that.' They wanted me to tell them that Troy confessed to me about killing that officer ... they made it clear that the only way they would leave me alone is if I told them what they wanted to hear."

The police wouldn't leave him alone! Or so he claims, and it's a very slender claim to justify false testimony against a man who was on trial for his life.

Did they beat you, Mr. Sapp? Were you water-boarded, Mr. Sapp? Did they threaten you with life in prison, Mr. Sapp?

Or was it just the inconvenience of multiple interrogations which produced your false testimony against a man who was on trial for his life?

So now another zephyr has blown Mr. Sapp across the street to the side of "innocence," and if yet another little wind blows him back to guilt again, shall we also ignore merely procedural prohibitions against double jeopardy and try Troy Davis again, and again and again as the trash who testified against him blows back and forth in obedience to a breeze which they alone can feel?

But Amy Goodman quotes Mr. Sapp with the same unquestioning credulity as if she were quoting Abraham Lincoln.

Ms. Goodman has reserved her indignation for Justice Antonin Scalia, with his mysterious scare-quotes in a dissenting opinion which Amy Goodman cannot fathom!

"This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

Why would Scalia quote "actually," and why would I likewise enclose "innocence" in the same alienating punctuation, (almost) wherever it appears in this essay? Is there suddenly something strangely questionable about the meaning of "innocence" and even "actuality?"

Yes.

The whole history of Roman and Anglo-Saxon criminal law is nothing but a long and incomprehensibly complicated process for defining guilt and innocence, and the climax of every criminal trial which ever reached a verdict was one determination or the other, guilty or innocent.

What else can it possibly mean to declare that a human being is guilty or innocent of a crime, except that he or she has been fairly tried and convicted in a court of law?

But now we declare our superior wisdom over so many generations of judges and legislatures, and install a "higher meaning" of guilt and innocence... a higher meaning which derives from more trust-worthy agencies than the courts, and more trust-worthy agents than judges and juries, and those new and unimpeachable agents and agencies of justice will be...

Amy Goodman and NPR? Pope Benedict XVI, President Jimmy Carter, the NAACP and Amnesty International, and whichever other previously unacknowledged legal authorities or organizations of well-meaning lawyers and NGO's just happens to be on our side in the case of Troy Davis?

Criminal law is an instrument for determining guilt and innocence analogous to the analytic apparatus for determining chemical composition which has evolved over three hundred years of scientific chemistry, and when that apparatus apparently malfunctions, where shall we appeal to correct it?

Shall we look around for yet another psychic like Martina Correia, someone supposedly as gifted at guessing chemical composition as Ms. Correia claims to be adept at reading the souls of detectives?

Or are we obliged to content ourselves with recalibrating our usual instruments or rechecking our measurements with brand new instruments of exactly the same or a slightly improved design, and if we cannot find a flaw in the procedure, what then?

Shall we call our mystery metal "gold" based on the well-meaning intervention Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI, and when another ex-President like George W. Bush and a Pope more like Alexander VI intervene in our lab and call all the silver in our pockets dross, to which higher authority will we appeal?

Now our mob supports Zelaya, and our favorite ex-President supports Troy Davis, but when another mob turns around on us, where can we appeal, when the law was already superseded by psychics and radio personalities, Popes and ex-Presidents?

Will you then flee from well-ordered cities and virtuous men? and is existence worth having on these terms? Or will you go to them without shame, and talk to them, Socrates? And what will you say to them? What you say here about virtue and justice and institutions and laws being the best things among men? Would that be decent of you? Surely not. But if you go away from well-governed States to Crito's friends in Thessaly, where there is great disorder and license, they will be charmed to have the tale of your escape from prison, set off with ludicrous particulars of the manner in which you were wrapped in a goatskin or some other disguise, and metamorphosed as the fashion of runaways is- that is very likely; but will there be no one to remind you that in your old age you violated the most sacred laws from a miserable desire of a little more life? Perhaps not, if you keep them in a good temper; but if they are out of temper you will hear many degrading things; you will live, but how?- as the flatterer of all men, and the servant of all men; and doing what?- eating and drinking in Thessaly, having gone abroad in order that you may get a dinner. And where will be your fine sentiments about justice and virtue then?

But whenever so many liberals or progressives or conservatives or Democrats or Republicans or any conceivable subgroup of the delusional fuddy-duddies who dominate American politics agree about anything, there's almost always a simple alternative which hasn't occurred to many of them, and in this case it's the simple expedient of a pardon from President Obama for Troy Davis, and the question why Mr. Obama hasn't already availed himself of this power is more genuinely interesting than any amount of middle-brow noise on the radio about trashy witnesses recanting their perjured testimony.