Troy Davis, convicted cop killer, was executed last week by the State of Georgia for the 1989 slaying of Officer Mark MacPhail. Anti-death penalty activists held Davis out as an innocent man, and repeatedly claimed that seven of the nine witnesses to the cold-blooded murder have since recanted their damning testimony. The liberal media, welcome bedfellows of those activists, blithely repeated the claims over and over, creating the impression that Davis was an innocent man and that his case proves that the death penalty is no longer acceptable public policy. …
A couple of weeks back I wrote a post revealing that the EU has been giving millions of euros to anti-death penalty groups in the United States. As The Wall Street Journal subsequently commented in an editorial on my Telegraph piece: European countries may need bailing out, but you’ll be pleased to know that the European Union has enough money to promote human rights and democracy—in America. Don’t laugh. American states are free to decide their own penal codes, which vary widely and change as facts and public values evolve. Europe won’t …
Why on earth are British taxpayers being forced to fund European Union lobbying for policy campaigns in the United States? Furthermore, why is the EU directly interfering in domestic political debates in America, and so far without Congressional oversight? As the research detailed below demonstrates, the EU’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is spending millions of Euros on US-based campaigns against the death penalty. An extraordinary development. The EIDHR project list for 2009 (the latest year for which a full itemised list is given), unearthed by my …
Heritage expert Alison Fraser on jobs
This fall the Supreme Court will hear two cases from Florida challenging a state’s ability to sentence violent juvenile offenders to life without the possibility of parole. Long unquestioned, life without parole for the very worst juvenile offenders only recently came under fire after Justice Anthony M. Kennedy reasoned in the majority opinion in Roper v Simmons that since teenagers are susceptible to negative influences, including peer pressure, capital punishment violated their 8th Amendment rights. Leftist activists have seized on this language, and are mounting a coordinated misinformation campaign to …
Jon Yorke, a British law lecturer who has written widely on the U.S. death penalty, argues that the law’s focus on the actual act’s pain (Baze v. Rees, presently pending in the Supreme Court, asks how courts should consider the risk of pain during execution) may be misplaced: While hypoxia might meet the approval of some, others argue that focusing on the dying moments of a prisoner is a distraction to the wider issue – the mental trial of being on death row for months or years. “No method of …
