OK- It’s nearly  three in the morning and I haven’t been able to sleep. I was reading up on the two executions  tonight.  One in Texas, and one in Georgia.  When I closed my eyes, I would see visions of a man being pulled feet first on a chain  behind a truck and dragged until his head and his  limbs broke away from his body.  The man was James Byrd, Jr., a black man who was dragged to his death by  three white supremacists, including Lawrence Russell Brewer, convicted of the murder and  sentenced to death.
Ross Byrd, the murdered mans’s son,  opposed the death penalty, stating that "You can't fight murder with murder," and noting that he hoped the state would show the  killer the mercy that his father never received. "Life in prison would have been fine. I know he can't hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn't what we want."
 Despite Mr. Byrd’s pleas, Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed by the State of Texas on September 21, 2011.
In Georgia, another prisoner was slated for execution.  Troy Davis was convicted in 1991 of killing off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail , who had intervened to stop a beating in a Burger King parking lot. Troy Davis was convicted on circumstantial evidence and  questionable eye-witness testimony. He has maintained his innocence throughout,  even as the lethal  injection was  being administered on 9/21/2011.
 The gun used in the shooting was never recovered, but casings from a gun  tied to Davis were “consistent” with the gun used to shoot Officer MacPhail. Davis was convicted by and large on the testimony of nine eye-witnesses, seven of whom recanted their testimony over the years. Some jurors have noted that if they had  been privy to evidence   that came to light after the trial, their verdict would have been different. But that  doesn’t matter. Davis’s lawyers filed several appeals. In divided decisions, the Georgia Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals refused to review his case,mostly on technical procedural grounds. In 2009 The US Supreme Court reviwed the case  and sent it back  to the District Court with instructions to examine Davis’s habeas petition.  Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote a sharp dissent: “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. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.”

This seems to be standard procedure for today’s conservative judges.  Guilt, innocence, justice, etc are not things the Courts should be concerned with.   They are after  convictions and  finality. This was clearly  in evidence in 1998,  when Judge  Sharon Keller of Texas wrote the opinion rejecting a new trial for Roy Criner, a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder in Texas, even though DNA tests after his trial showed that it was not his semen in the victim. “We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,” she later told the television news program “Frontline.” “We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important.”  Based on evidence   of his “actual innocence” Crider was exonerated and released in 2000.

Which leads me to question  just where we, as a nation, are headed. We began with  lofty ideals and rhetoric about being a shining beacon on a hill. Even Ronald Reagan, in his farewell address to the nation, said ,”'I've spoken of the Shining City all my political life. …In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.'"

But the idea  of  the shining city on the hill was first voiced by Governor John Winthrop in 1630, and it contained a warning: “"For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses . . “

I fear sometimes that we have  been dealing falsely. That the eyes of all people are   confused and saddened, and that the eyes of God may be distressed,  saddened and angry. What we are becoming as a nation is not what we started out to be. And it keeps me awake at night.