If you were a relative of the slain police officer and believed that Troy Davis was guilty, how would you feel if the county attorney had not fought for the conviction?

Ginger,

I hope I would want Davis to be in prison for life. More importantly, I would want the actual perpetrator in jail. With respect, it says a lot more about us as a society that we want to kill him than it does about him as a possible murderer. I thought Davis deserved another trial.

There was a chilling study done out of Illinois which said that poor investigations by the police, and problematic prosecutions not only lead to people being on death row who shouldn't have been, but likely cost Illinois (alone) multiple millions of dollars in damage due to the real perpetrators of crime being on the streets and unpunished.

I feel like sometimes I'm veering into GET OFFA MY LAWN territory with social networking schtuff. My concern, the more I think about it, is that she appears to think so little of herself in public.

Oh yeah, my kids' pages are a mess. I get all guns and drugs and gang stuff, or all promiscuity and pregnancy and babies stuff. But honestly, none of them are going to college. Maaaybe it'll affect job stuff, but it's doubtful. Half their potential employers don't have internet access.

Or if they do, they certainly don't give a shit. In the case of my students, Gamestop or Target or Sears will still hire you even if you do nothing but talk about taking E at some concert.

Yeah, I doubt college admissions officials are spending too much time doing outside research either. If anything, they're overwhelmed by application materials as it is. Do they need further evidence that kids act dumb?

I did tell my students their crappy SAT scores are a much bigger hindrance to admission than the pictures on facebook of them throwing gang signs and drinking.

All of that said, I don't friend ANY of my current students on facebook. I just don't want to know. And I don't want them to know my navelgazing either. I do friend former students when interested or when guilted into it. But that's about it.

But again, I am NOT the teacher people share with. I am the teacher you go to for help with your college essay, not the one you go to when your period is late (true story of kid in my class right now!). You go to one of the squashy teachers. I'm one of the prickly ones.

(My students are a lot like liese's in practice if not in demographics.... poverty = the great equalizer!)

Yeah, see also: West Memphis Three. Some folks will never be convinced that they didn't do this thing. Including at least one of the fathers of the victims. Cognitive dissonance is powerful.

But I'd also like them to stop cursing constantly (which for my lower socio-economic students is more likely to be a hindrance to getting a job than their online life) and to capitalize the first person nominative pronoun. The latter seems more like a battle I'm willing to fight rather than the former.

HA! Yeah, ITA.

I'm agreeing with you, Kat; but I'm not just thinking about what is written -- I'm thinking of camera phone shots and vids of parties that go viral around the school, and you KNOW some of that stuff gets send out beyond, to a cousin in NY or New Bumsticks or wherever. That's the stuff that makes me cringe for those kids.

Ok, I gotta get some sleep. Long, tiring but productive day.

Heh -- now I'm thinking of a teacher Kinsey: the Squash/Prickle continuum.

I was an academic Prickle, but an "I think I'm pregnant" Squashy. "You're still getting a D on that paper, but let me listen to you and give you some advice."

What the family believes could be wrong.

Of course they could be wrong. I'm just saying it's the obligation of the prosecution to defend the case against appeals, and the courts say they don't have enough evidence to overturn the conviction.

Attorneys uphold the law. I'm not sure justice is involved.

eta: I'm not trying to be argumentative here. I think the system stinks. I think it stinks so badly that I would happily abolish the death penalty, even though I'm not morally against it, because you can't undo dead.

Yeah, I'm squashy. We do a lot of work to not be the authority figures in their lives, even though we totally are and they respond to us that way. But Dave's pink mohawk goes a long way toward them going to us for stuff they wouldn't talk to their teachers or dorm parents or whatever about. And half the value of that is that I don't respond to the crazy stuff they pull. They know, and they know I know, but I may be the one adult in their lives that honestly isn't that worried about them smoking pot. Meth, we got another story. But I know more about what actually goes on in their day than most adults. So then we can get past that and have conversations about the bigger stuff, the important stuff.

I tried not to friend any students at first. Hell, I tried not to friend donors. But they found me, and I felt it would do more damage to refuse. So my own public internet profile is all hummingbirds and canning. I don't talk religious-speak, and I don't talk fannish, and I don't talk about much, really. I'm on there all the time; I'm present, but the actual content is fractional.

And both sides of my potential audience out there are seriously sensitive. I got worried when someone joked on my grape jelly post about fermentation. So I pay attention to my social networking image in general, but treat walled gardens and places like this as if they were private. I got jumpy at the bronzer/buffista conversation over on facebook. I really do try not to cross the streams, but I suspect at this point we're pretty much in the ocean.

My binge drinking and sleeping around occurred in college for me, too. It was not, however, advertised on social media.

In my case, it was only that it didn't exist. I regularly give thanks that cell phone cameras and facebook weren't around, there would be a lot more pictures of me doing stupid shit in the world. Frankly, even with cameras, there are a lot of pictures of me doing stupid shit.

It's the obligation of the prosecution to seek justice, not defend, I think. So if evidence comes to light that says, "this is not the correct person," then they need to drop it. But in order to bring a capital case to trial, you would have to, as a human, really be convinced that the evidence clearly points to this individual. And in that convincing, it's difficult, and probably takes a herculean effort to be swayed by new evidence. That's the dissonance. Too often those charged with prosecuting crimes (and cops, too) get tunnel vision. Sometimes, a fresh pair of eyes looks at the evidence and says, "wait, there was this other dude, and here's his DNA, and look, he owned that gun..and what the fuck were you thinking?"

It's not that they're being intentionally stupid or anything. It's just really human to double-down in the face of being wrong, especially when circumstances are so dire.