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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

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Troy Davis: Not Dead Yet

By Matthew Yglesias

Jul 17 2007, 8:34 AM ET Comment

Georgia Board of Pardons and parole gives Troy Davis a 90 day stay of execution so they can consider the evidence of his innocence -- that the eyewitnesses on the basis of whose testimony he was convicted have recanted -- the very evidence that the courts are prohibited by federal law from considering.

Someone or other mentioned to me yesterday that in a sick way Davis is lucky he got the death penalty since that meant some people were paying attention to the case and a minor ruckus eventually got raised. Suppose Davis had just been sitting in prison on a 20-to-life sentence, would anyone have even noticed? The extent to which the criminal justice system allows for the railroading of poor people with little means is simply off the charts, and the incredible reliance on wildly unreliable eyewitness testimony is a big part of the issue.

UPDATE: Wait, wait; it looks like the Board of Pardons and Paroles may not actually have the power to pardon, only to commute the sentence to life in prison. Oy. If the man's innocent, he's innocent.

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