The recantation of nearly all the witnesses in the case should give even the most serious supporters of the death penalty reason to pause. Whether Davis is innocent or guilty almost takes a backseat to the question of whether the judicial system operated in a way that gave a jury any hope of possibly answering that question in the first place.

Death penalty critics have often pointed out that seeking the death of an individual, even one guilty of heinous crimes, is not justice, its vengeance. Yet even that answer fails to satisfy the questions surrounding the prosecution and planned execution of Troy Davis. Even the vengeful would be unsettled by the true perpetrator of a crime going free while they vent their wrath on the wrong target.

No, what the Davis case indicates is that the death penalty is not a public policy — it is a faith, a belief system, a creed holding that fallible humans have been infallible in discerning guilt from innocence. And like most other true-believers, those who practice the faith of capital punishment are immune to all evidence to the contrary.

[R]ate regulators cannot lower rates to starve the utility of the capital needed to run its business. Debit card customers have a choice in banks, so there is no need to mandate any bank serve any particular customer. Yet banks also have capital needs, which is why, if anything, they need greater protection against government confiscation by arbitrarily low rates.

There’s nothing particularly outrageous about the health care mandate. The federal government penalizes people for doing, and not doing, any number of things. I’m currently being punished by the tax code for failing to buy a mortgage, for example. I’d love it if the courts embraced a jurisprudence that placed limits on the federal government’s ability to engage in this kind of social engineering via the tax code. But no one seriously expects that to happen.