Will Anti State Execution Catholics Regret the Troy Davis Case

A little rant here.

I was gripped like many people over the recent Georgia execution of Troy Davis. For the record I was hoping his sentence would becommuted to life. I still wish it had.

A person can have many views of that case. One can think regardless of what he did he should not be executed. One could think that in this partucular case the facts did not merit death. However what got people in an uproar about this case was as the twitter hashtag said #toomuchdoubt.

The Troy Davis story was not on my radar until just a few days before when with a great splash it hit social media in the domestic USA. It appears thougt quite a campaign based on #toomuchdoubt had happened abroad.

The timing of this domestic wise struck me as odd. As Jeffery Toobin of CNN tried to explain to a foreign reporter that outside the activist community this story had not been big in the USA.

Two days before his execution I , and everyone else, was bombarded on how we were going to put a innocent man to death. That almost all the witnesses recanted and the machinary of death would not stop. At first I was outraged.

However I kept noticing as what was not being tweeted. Nothing was being tweeted or bloged about his appeals. There was no talk about what State or Federal Judges thought of all these claims. In particular no one was mentioning that in a unprecedented move the U.S. Supreme Court had a judge take a look at this case with a fresh mind.

There appears to be good reason for this. That is #toomuchdoubt looks to be as the a Federal Judge said " smoke and mirrors". See Troy Davis: guilty as charged.

I have just finished reading the 175 page odd Federal Judge opinion that reviewed this case and I feel hoodwinked. I don't feel hoodwinked by the State of Georgia or the Federal Government ,but by anti State execution advocates that left so much out their #toomuchdoubt story. So much so that it is basically a lie in my opinion.

Now as to Catholic anti State execution advocates it could very well be they were hoodwinked like everyone else and were not aware of those facts. However if they were NOT they were engaging in a huge sin of omission.

If I am going to go out and advocate a position to my friends and neighbors I expect to have some form of the truth to base it on. It is my credibility on the line and also I am speaking as a Catholic . In my area that conversation is too non Catholics.

The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Paragraph 22 of the Exercises has beautiful passage that says the following :

That both the giver and the maker of the Spiritual Exercises may be of greater help and benefit to each other, it should be presupposed that every good Christian ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor's statement than to condemn it. Further, if one cannot interpret it favorably, one should ask how the other means it. If that meaning is wrong, one should correct the person with love; and if this is not enough, one should search out every appropriate means through which, by understanding the statement in a good way, it may be saved."

Now I try to live my life by this little code more and more. In this instance, and I think it's very apt here , I am going to presuppose that reputable Catholics were not aware of certain facts.

I have no problem with people anti execution. I am getting more and more anti execution each day. However if you are going to make out a case that the State is basically acting like a reckless murderer then make it. Don't shade the truth to make your case look better.

The question is if people will come aware of all these facts that no one seemed to mention in the two day period before Mr Davis's execution. If the public does become aware I afraid they will not trust the assertions of anti execution groups. Even sadly some Catholic ones.