Capital Punishment

It is sad that in the face of doubt a man, Troy Davis was executed - despite public demand, including a high profile Amnesty International campaign, that the execution not take place.

Le Rouge Journal has previously discussed the United States' complex relationship with human rights and their enforcement, with 'Bystander's Affect':

'Ms Power showed a consistent invocation of isolationist stances by the US, even where lives were very likely to be lost. There is even a suggestion that the resolve of the aggressors was strengthened by American inactivity (Power, 2003);'

and its struggle for legitmacy in holding other nations to account in 'Shifting the Focus', due to the double standard that capital punishment creates:

'[an] example is the Iranian Government's anger at being singled out for its sentence of death for a convicted woman. They deflected accusations by pointing to an American 'Double Standard' (Dehghan, 2010), as the United States at the time held a woman awaiting death for an arranged murder, who allegedly suffered mental health problems.'

We now have a new inconsistency to add to this list: going ahead with an execution in the face of mass public objection flies in the face of the idea of policing & government by consent of the policed & governed.

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References:
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+ Samantha Power's '"A problem from hell": America and the Age of Genocide'; Harper Perennial; 2003. See an extract by clicking here.

+ Saeed Kamali Dehghan's 'Iran accuses US of double standards over woman's execution'