Thursday, September 22, 2011

Tragedy Troy



Well, the State of Georgia just put a scumbag down. Personally, I think this was a mistake. Not because I think Troy Davis was 'innocent', but because I have changed my mind on the Death Penalty. Brian Nichols was on video killing people in the Fulton County Courthouse and he got life in prison. Troy Davis should have got the same.


So between the Amnesty Hippies and the "Fire Up Sparky" crowd, lets take a look at the actual case:


Problems for the prosecution:

1) A big problem for the prosecution was the fact that evidence from a search of Davis's mother's home was thrown out as the police were unable to prove that they acted with probable cause (no warrant). This evidence involved a pair of shorts found in a dryer in the home, as well as anything else.

2) Some have claimed that there was "no" physical evidence. This is not the case.Shell casings recovered at the scene matched the casings recovered from a previous shooting earlier in the evening to which Davis was present for.

3) Proving motive. During testimony at trial a family neighbor Jeffrey Sapp testified that Davis had confessed to the shooting to him. Kevin McQueen a fellow inmate Testified that he had also confessed to him. Stating that he had shot MacPhail for fear of the officer connecting him to the shooting earlier in the evening

4) Additionally based on crime scene reconstruction and testimony at trial, Officer MacPhail upon coming to the aid of Larry Young ran past Sylvester Cole, One could conclude that Davis the only one of those two with a motive to shoot MacPhail. Some of wondered if Coles shot MacPhail? However, the question remains why would he have done that?

5) Sylvester Coles himself was a problem for prosecutors. He admitted at trial that he too owned a .38 caliber, but had given it to another man earlier in the evening. That is a big, big problem for the prosecutors case. Where is the gun?

If one were to argue there is questionable evidence that Davis is guilty, there is even less that Coles is.

Problems with Davis's defense:

The issues with Davis's defense were plenty.

1) Davis's trial for killing the officer was clumped in together with being charged with shooting Cooper and the beating of Larry Young. His defense atty should have objected, as the other alleged crimes would taint the jury against Davis effectively making it look like 1 crime. .

2) Davis fingered for being at the scene of two shootings/three crimes on the same night. The shell casings from both shootings matched. They came from the same .38 caliber. Common denominator: Troy Davis.

3) Davis was also at the scene of the beating of Larry Young, the homeless man in the parking lot the night of MacPhail's death and the person he was trying to assist.

4) Taking off for Atlanta the same night as the shootings. So it is just a coincidence that he flees to Atlanta the same night of the two shootings. Atlanta is a 4 hour ride from Cloverdale (where Davis is from) some 248 miles. If you didn't do anything or weren't involved at all where are you going?

5) The fact that the cop was shot twice implies intent to kill. This isn't a case of a gun mistakenly going off in a struggle. This goes back to the prosecution's argument for motive. Whoever shot MacPhail wanted to be sure he was dead. These things matter to a jury.

6) For the Davis defense and this applies mostly to the appeal process. How reliable are the reenactments of the previous prosecution witnesses? Were they lying then, now or have memories simply faded.

7) How much does their change of testimony reflect the pending execution and how much of it reflects them actually telling the truth "this time". An 80% reenactment rate is rather incredulous. Either there was some massive conspiracy involving cops, neighbors, friends and inmates to convict him or memories are really bad.

8) Some argue that some witnesses were intimidated my police, as some witnesses later stated. However, what about the neighbor Jeffrey Sapp or Kevin McQueen? Why would they lie about a confession? What about the other 20% who stuck by their testimony.

The Verdict:

This focus on this case by people and the media is about the death penalty and that alone. I see signs that say "Free Troy Davis". Even if his execution was commuted he would not be set free.

Even at trial, if the jury had come back without a conviction they would have said "not guilty", not "innocent".

Given the preponderance of albeit circumstantial evidence, I suspect he is guilty.

I suspect that upon realizing Davis would be executed people recanted testimony not because they had lied before, but to keep him from being executed.

Would I commute the execution? Probably, since there are some unknowns. Davis made a choice to shoot MacPhail the second time, which is what seals it for me. However, it just isn't as air tight as I might like for death penalty case, but I do think he is guilty of the crime just the same.

That being said, Troy Davis is not innocent.





Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Davis_case#Shootings_and_arrest
http://legalcases.info/troydavis/
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/troy-davis-executed-parole-board-denies-clemency-131916604.html
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/opinion/stories/2008/10/21/lawtoned_1021.html?cxntlid=inform_sr
Edited 2 days ago Report Abuse

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

'Fair Taxation'


Here is a novel idea on 'fair taxation'...First all taxes have to be repealed and replaced by a single fee on transactions in US dollars.

My rate is .49%, so a dollar is tax-free. A penny on a two. Two on five, nickel on ten, dime on twenty, quarter on fifty, Kennedy half on a Bennie.

For every single time that some amount, counted in USD that trades hands (excluding CASH) has a fee that goes to support the monetary system.

If it was the worst idea in the world and the economy tanked by 50%, it would still bring in $10 Trillion in revenue.


Imagine ten of them. Our GNP is only $15 Trillion. No magic at all.

Except in breaking the spell of the way it has always been and everyone thought or were taught.

That's enough to send every citizen a check for $1200 a month.

Fund government at all levels at current budgets.

And still run trillions in surplus that would pay the debt off in a decade.

The mystification comes when people understand millions versus billions versus trillions versus quadrillions, which is what we have to use to count all the money changing hands in USD every year.

But most of it is the big players. Those who use the monetary infrastructure at the greatest scale, pay the most tax. Totally voluntary in that if you don't want to pay the tax, don't make the purchase.

Once the national debt is paid, we could cut the rate by half.

I keep the challenge open for anyone to prove my math wrong on this.

It is the only fair tax, because it doesn't discriminate against any class of transaction, nor does it give special treatment to any particular activity or purchase or investment. If you think it's what you want to do is use USDollars to transact some business, that costs half a percent fee to fund the system (and the government, too, incidentally).

You are paying into the income fund, which kicks out a base income for every man woman and child for the sole reason that they are beautiful human beings that are alive and among us on this planet.

Everyone gets a base wage no matter how worthless and lazy and self-destructive they may be. People who were only working to freaking pay for a place to stay while they worked on their masterpieces no longer are taking that job from someone who really wants one.

We do away with the minimum wage, and instead install a regime that simply pays poverty off. Cheaper than fighting crime, hunger, disease, urban decay and the whole nine.

And to make it fair, everyone gets it.

What would people do? You think some of them might go spend that money into the economy for things they want and need? Does that seem like a good stimulus package? Do you think that would help unemployment?

It is this sort of setup that scares the powers that be to their core. Because now wages are going to have to rise in a lot of cases because half the underpaid workforce just quit to just live on their check.

The rest are much happier, because they are no longer really all that afraid of losing their job. If they do, they at least know they'll have their citizen's dividend coming in every month. And lots of places are hiring in this environment.

The only inflation that I have found to be virtuous is the inflation that occurs when wages are rising.

Maybe they wouldn't rise. When the sum total of taxes that it costs to employ someone is .49%, then wages have room in current budgets to rise, or like the fair tax is talking about, giving the employer the discretion as to how to allocate that massive tax cut.

The industries hit the hardest by this alternative taxation method is those who move the most money.

But here's the sneaky thing. When I go buy a loaf of bread and pay my penny tax, just like sales tax, it was never the grocery store's money to begin with. They end up spending that penny when they make a deposit. When they pay the bakery who baked the bread, they have to pay that penny to that company. Maybe the bakery accepts an electronic transfer to the bank it uses that is in Oklahoma. The bank transfers that money, consolidated with other pennies paid in bread transactions to the baker's bank on an interbank transfer network.

This is where taxes are collected. There are very few of these networks, and they move a ton of money. One of those entities, incidentally, is the federal reserve, because they still have the check clearing framework. This is where the pennies are siphoned off to the treasury, to pay our dividend.

And it is the data from those networks that I use to make my calculations. The Bank of International Settlements publishes some very rough estimates of the volumes and values of transactions that occur over various digital networks.

The DTCC processes most securities, like stocks and bonds and foreign exchange transactions, over a quadrillion dollars worth a year. Their current fee for this service is like .0015% per transaction. Now it would be the never unpaid .49% plus their fee, with the treasury receiving the .49%.

Large interbank transfers are on the fed, or SWIFT. Very few entities handle nearly all the money at some point in time. Other entities could register an account with the treasury and set up a business running a payment network of some sort that used USD.

The volumes of dollars that these primary fat money pipes do every day is astounding. If Congress directed those entities to collect a .49% fee on every transaction, they could repeal all the other taxes and have more money in the treasury than they could possibly imagine.

We keep the federal reserve, but remove its power as the national debt enabler. Implement a 100% reserve requirement for all new lending. Those who want to earn a return on their money may invest in their bank's lending program. The current hegemony of pushing reserves up the pyramid is done. The reserves are held by the lending bank. They may no longer lend money they do not have (creating it out of thin air like they do now). The Fed no longer sets interest rates, because your local bank can do that.

The states could piggyback the same system and eliminate all their own taxes, pulling any funding that would normally come from the federal level before the fee hits the national treasury.

I have no idea whether I get anywhere with all this, because it seems a bit too good to be true. I can't say what all the various things the economy might do once the distortions of the current tax regime are no longer relevant.

There are a lot of transactions that are currently untaxed. Those are mainly in the financial sector. I couldn't think of a better bunch of bastards to dump a tiny little tax on than those folks. They would scream bloody murder and pull out all the stops on the propaganda channels and politicians they own. But they are sorely outnumbered, and after all, it's the fairest tax ever devised, only in recent times technologically possible, and nullifying the control-freak, social engineering weapon of tyranny that taxation has become.