[/caption]Carol Forsloff - Casey Anthony was declared innocent of killing her two-year-old daughter Caylee in Florida, despite a host of incriminating, circumstantial evidence, according to experts, while Troy Davis was executed in Georgia for killing a policeman, as the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) report released in July concluded that “race, geography, money, and other arbitrary factors continue to make receiving the death penalty as random as being “struck by lightning,” as Justice Potter Stewart observed in 1976.
Although Casey Anthony became a hated public figure, given the descriptions of how two-year-old Caylee’s disappearance was not reported by the mother until more than 30 days had passed and that the condition of the child’s body revealed horrific circumstances related to both the death and disposal of the body. Legal experts and others took turns proclaiming how clear the evidence was in pointing to Casey Anthony’s guilt. Objections to the verdict of innocent came from every part of the culture, when Casey, a young, white mother in Florida, was found innocent of killing her child. Even George Anthony, Casey’s father, told Dr. Phil in an interview after the trial he believes that his daughter was somehow involved in Caylee’s death, perhaps through an accident, but an accident that involved an extensive cover-up.
Troy Davis was executed on Wednesday night, following years of appeals and more than a million signatures on a petition requesting the courts to reconsider the death penalty in his case. Seven eyewitnesses at the trial recanted their testimony years later, while another man actually confessed to killing the policeman for which Davis was sentenced to death. Davis was a black man in Georgia who was found guilty of killing a white policeman.
While there are deviations from the DPIC report with respect to some of the specifics involved in comparing these two cases, eyewitness reports, that were recanted, had been the evidence used for the death penalty to be ordered for Davis. Circumstantial evidence of numerous types along with a lifetime of lies as background, with respect to Casey Anthony’s character, were underlined as insufficient for a guilty verdict, especially in a capital murder case.
The DPIC report states, “Many of those who favored the death penalty in the abstract have come to view its practice very differently. They have reached the conclusion that if society's ultimate punishment cannot be applied fairly, it should not be applied at all. The report then goes on to tell us that most of the nine justices who declared the death penalty did not violate the Constitution agreed the experiment had failed. Justices Blackman, Powell, and Stevens changed their minds and would have agreed with Justices Marshall and Brennan that capital punishment was unconstitutional.
The report goes on to review the inequities in capital punishment cases, especially that those defendants who are African American and kill white victims are more likely to receive the death penalty than those who kill members of other races, especially white victims. Most executions occur in a handful of states, largely in the South. Costs figure greatly in the quality of defense one receives. Finally, the states have different ways of reviewing cases so that in some states virtually all death sentences are upheld by state courts while in others they are overturned.
Troy Davis was executed in Georgia on September 21, 2011, after a state court upheld his execution on a vote of 3 to 2 and the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.
