Don't have any more than that, but I just got an alert from the Associated Press on my iPhone. Will update as soon as they're more.
1:32 PM PT: Story is now up: http://hosted.ap.org/...
JACKSON, Ga. (AP) -- A Georgia judge has refused to halt the execution of death row inmate Troy Davis after a last-minute appeal by his attorneys.
Davis' attorney Brian Kammer said a Butts County Superior Court judge on Wednesday rejected an appeal by Davis.
Davis is scheduled to die at 7 p.m. EDT on Wednesday for the killing of off-duty Savannah officer Mark MacPhail.
His attorneys filed an appeal earlier in the day challenging ballistics evidence linking Davis to the crime and eyewitness testimony identifying Davis as the shooter. They say the evidence was "egregiously false and misleading."
Even leaving aside the debate over the death penalty in general and the humaneness thereof, and even if you could justify specifically heinous crimes requiring it, there's the problem of passing absolute judgment on a person in a system that we know to be imperfect. How can you justify killing someone even if you are 99% sure they're guilty if there's still that 1% chance they are not.
I think this really speaks to a larger problem with our justice system in that it seems to be more and more focused on punishment to the exclusion of rehabilitation. Recidivism rates have skyrocketed and private corrections companies are profiting immensely off of it. We're incarcerating people for offenses that don't even harm anyone other than the perpetrator (i.e., drug use), literally turning them into hardened criminals all but guaranteed to commit worse crimes upon their release. And now here we are killing people when we aren't even certain they actually committed the crime in question.
I for one don't like what that says about us as a society at all. What can we do to change that?