Troy Davis was to be executed last Wednesday, September 21 at 7pm EST in Jackson, Georgia. At 7:02pm, he was still alive. Rumours that Davis had just been granted his fourth stay of execution since 1997 began to circulate online.
I flipped on the live feed from Democracy Now – Amy Goodman was broadcasting live outside the prison where Davis was held. She was standing in front of a roped-off area, speaking to some of the 700 supporters who had gathered that day, hoping that someone – the Georgia Parole Board, the Supreme Court, President Obama – would save Davis’ life.
Davis was convicted in 1991 for the 1989 murder of a white off-duty police officer named Mark MacPhail. Davis has spent the last 20 years appealing this conviction, alongside a global movement of activists. An online petition in support of Davis generated nearly one million signatures. High profile supporters included former US President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI, a former FBI director, the NAACP, and Outkast’s “Big Boi” and many others.
Davis’ conviction was based solely on witness testimony. Davis’ lawyers say that 7 of 9 main witnesses have since recanted their testimony, claiming that the police officers investigating the case intimidated them into pointing the finger at Davis. There is no forensic or DNA evidence against Davis. No murder weapon was ever found. Davis’ family and his supporters argue that these circumstances present much more than a “reasonable doubt,” but Davis’ appeals have been unsuccessful.
False witness evidence has proven to be a critical factor in three-quarters of cases where convicted prisoners are found to be innocent.
At 7:30pm, Davis was still alive, but a stay was unconfirmed. Forty thousand people were watching the Democracy Now feed along with me. NAACP President Ben Jealous was being interviewed by Goodman, saying, “We came here prepared for a miracle or a funeral. And we’ve heard that we just got a miracle.”
But no miracle came. Police presence at the prison increased. Police helicopters flew overhead. Cordons of police in riot gear with tear gas rifles closed in on the area where protesters were gathered.
News came that Davis had been granted a reprieve, not a stay, which lasted only a few hours. The Supreme Court declined the appeal for a stay without comment. Davis was pronounced dead at 11:08pm.
Thomas Ruffin, one of Davis’ lawyers, witnessed the execution. He said, “That’s not just a legalized lynching, that’s a threat to all innocent life in this society.” Protesters had taken up the chant, “We are Troy Davis,” implying that Davis’ experience is a harrowing example of how any American could be killed even if there is reason to doubt their guilt.
This case isn’t just about the death penalty or the possibility that innocent people die on death row. It’s about the willingness of the police and the courts to criminalize, prosecute, and convict people of colour, especially men. Davis is a poor Black single man convicted of killing a married white police officer with young children. Around the time of MacPhail’s death, a local reporter commented that the police wanted to have a suspect behind bars before the funeral took place. Ruffin claims that nearly half of the people on death row in Georgia are black men, even though black men represent only 15% of the population there.
The truth is that Davis probably died because he was not able to afford the representation he needed, and because of legislation that limited his ability to get a fair trial. Davis appealed his conviction in 1995. That year, Congress cut $20 million in funding to “post-conviction defender organizations” such as the Georgia Resource Center, who represented Davis. The Center lost 70% of its budget, which meant that it was unable to afford to examine witnesses that would have helped Davis’ case.
In 1996, a year after the Oklahoma City bombing and seven months before an election, President Clinton introduced the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). The act prohibits appeals that are based on evidence that would have been available at the time of the trial, such as additional testimony of the witnesses that the Georgia Center couldn’t afford to examine. This includes testimony from the man who originally accused Davis of killing MacPhail, a man who some say confessed to killing MacPhail himself.
Davis died, not because of evidence of his guilt, but because systemic barriers prevented him from being able to establish his innocence.
Davis’ case is infuriating, and it is also part of a larger injustice happening in the American prison system. Michelle Alexander made headlines in March when her book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness” was released. She claims, “There are more African American adults under correctional control today – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the civil war began.”
There are more African-American adults in the correctional system than there were slaves before 1850.
Alexander claims that this is largely a result of the war on drugs, which is disproportionately waged in communities of colour, even though drug use is present in white communities at about the same rates. Once convicted, these people of colour are “denied denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits.”
How are you supposed to advocate for your community if you can’t vote? How are you supposed to be represented by your peers if they can’t serve on juries? How are you supposed to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps if you can’t find work and can’t access social programs?
There are more African-American adults in correctional control than there were slaves before 1850. I keep repeating it because this is unfathomable to me.
On the night Troy Davis died, his sister, Martina Correia, said: “Sometimes, just because a movement grows, and the truth comes out, we still have people who are not willing to change their old ways. I’m here to tell you that no matter what happens this evening, the old South will fall.”
She had better be right.
