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Tag: troy davis

Death Penalty Support May Be Dying

More than a week has passed since the execution of Troy Davis, who insisted he was innocent until his eyes closed forever.

Georgia won this battle, but it has potentially ignited a movement to eliminate the death penalty in this country. If we’ve learned anything from Davis’ execution, it’s that our judicial system is too flawed — too human, really — to claim the right to kill another human being. And this time, millions of Americans were paying attention.

In the weeks leading up to Davis’ execution, a grass-roots effort to publicize Davis’ case mobilized tens of thousands of people — including some of the greatest legal minds in America — to protest his scheduled execution. People who never had cared two minutes about a stranger’s execution could tell you that seven of the nine witnesses in Davis’ case had recanted.

Immediately after his execution, Facebook news feeds exploded with posts of anger and despair. I’ve been writing about false prosecutions for 10 years, and I never have seen such widespread outrage against the death penalty.

In Ohio, where I live, Gov. John Kasich recently spared the life of death row inmate Joseph Murphy. Kasich took into consideration the convicted murderer’s horrific childhood, as well as lobbying by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. This is the fifth time since June that an Ohio execution has been postponed or called off.

Though Kasich’s decision to spare a man’s life is a just outcome, the underlying principle of gubernatorial authority in executions is jarring — one person with all that power over another person’s life. We elect fellow humans to be governors, not gods.

Speaking of God, I have a question for those self-proclaimed Christians who continue to find biblical wiggle room in their defense of the death penalty: How do you do that with a straight face? Our country was not founded as a Christian nation, no matter how many times you insist otherwise. But if you’re so sure it is one, then you’ve got a real problem with the Word. It’s “thou shalt not kill,” not “thou shalt not kill except in Ohio, in Texas, in Georgia…”

And what kind of Christian — strike that: what kind of human being — applauds executions? That was a mind-freeze of a moment at a recent Republican presidential debate. NBC’s Brian Williams noted that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has authorized more executions — 234 — than any governor in the history of the United States, and before Perry even could respond, the audience erupted into applause and whistles.

Instead of recoiling in horror or even chastising the merrymakers, Perry pointed to the applause as proof of widespread support for the death penalty.

“I think Americans understand justice. I think Americans are clearly, in the vast majority of cases, supportive of capital punishment.”

Give the governor a clue, please.

Contrast the crowd response at that debate with the behavior of those who actually witnessed Troy Davis’ death last week. There’s no hootin’ and hollerin’ when the reality of the death penalty unfolds right before your eyes.

Rhonda Cook, a crime reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has witnessed 12 executions, and she attended the one for Davis. She described for NPR’s Neal Conan the response of her fellow witnesses, including a number of reporters, the murder victim’s son and brother, and three people who were there for Davis:

“In the chamber, nobody moves; nobody speaks; nobody reacts. And of all that I’ve covered, I’ve never seen anybody do anything. Everyone is very stoic.”

And so Troy Davis is dead.

Amnesty International urged Davis’ supporters to “take a moment to honor the life of Troy Davis and (victim) Mark MacPhail. Then, let’s take all of our difficult feelings and re-double our commitment to abolition of the death penalty.”

That was Davis’ dying wish, too, which he expressed as he lay on the gurney:

“All I can ask … is that you look deeper into this case so that you really can finally see the truth.

“I ask my family and friends to continue to fight this fight.

“For those about to take my life, God have mercy on your souls. And may God bless your souls.”

Georgia has scheduled another execution for next week.

God has nothing to do with it.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

Troy Davis, R.I.P.: One Day The Truth Will Come Out

2000: Frank Lee Smith is posthumously exonerated — he’d died 11 months earlier — 14 years after being convicted of raping and murdering an 8-year-old girl. The eyewitnesses were wrong.

2001: Charles Fain is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl. The scientific testimony was wrong.

2002: Ray Krone is exonerated and set free 10 years after being sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a bar worker. The scientific testimony was wrong.

2003: John Thompson is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced to death for murder. The prosecutors hid exculpatory scientific evidence and the eyewitnesses were wrong.

2004: Ryan Matthews is exonerated and set free five years after being sentenced to death for killing a convenience store owner. The eyewitnesses were wrong.

2008: Kennedy Brewer is exonerated and set free seven years after being sentenced to death for killing his girlfriend’s 3-year-old daughter. The scientific testimony was wrong.

2010: Anthony Graves is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced to death for the murder of an entire family. The sole eyewitness — who was himself the murderer — lied.

I could make a much longer list.

There are literally hundreds of men, and even a few women, who have been exonerated and set free after being sentenced to death, life, 25, 60, even 400 years for awful things they did not do. I could make a longer list, but space is at a premium and there is more that needs saying here.

They killed Troy Davis on Wednesday night.

He went to his death still proclaiming his innocence of the 1989 murder of a Savannah, Ga., police officer. Davis was convicted on “evidence” that boiled down to the testimony of nine eyewitnesses, seven of whom later recanted.

But Spencer Lawton, who originally prosecuted the case, would not want you to worry your head about that. Hours before Davis was put to death, Lawton was quoted by CNN as saying he had no doubts about the case and was confident Davis was the killer. How much do you want to bet the prosecutors of Fain, Brewer, Krone or any of those hundreds of others would have said the same thing, expressed the same confidence? Without that confidence, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Meaning the death penalty, a flimsy edifice erected on the shaky premise that we always get it right, that human systems always work as designed, that witnesses make no mistakes, that science is never fallible, that cops never lie, that lawyers are never incompetent.

You have to believe that. You have to make yourself believe it. Otherwise, how do you sleep at night? So, of course, a prosecutor speaks confidence. What else is he going to speak? Truth? Truth is too big, too dangerous, too damning. Truth asks a simple question: in what field of endeavor have we always gotten it right? And you know the answer to that.

So truth is too pregnant for speaking. Better to avert your eyes and profess your confidence.

But one day, too late for Troy Davis, too late for too many, truth will out.

Godspeed that day the cards come tumbling down.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

(c) 2011 The Miami Herald Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Will Troy Davis’ Execution Lead To The Abolition Of The Death Penalty? Probably Not.

Troy Davis’ execution in Georgia Wednesday night elicited massive amounts of publicity and general outrage.

But, despite the impression given by the media, Davis wasn’t the only American executed that night. The fact that another execution was met with relative silence reflects most Americans’ persistent refusal to openly call for the complete abolition of the death penalty.

Wednesday marked a climax of death penalty coverage and discussion as the dismayed public learned of Davis’ execution. His case involved a considerable amount of doubt — there was no physical evidence tying him to the 1989 murder of Officer Mark MacPhail, and seven of nine witnesses had recanted their testimonies. For years, Davis’ family and human rights activists around the world campaigned on his behalf. The legal fight culminated with a last-minute appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the execution. Up until his dying breath, Davis asserted his innocence.

On the same night, Lawrence Brewer was executed in Texas. He was convicted of the 1998 racially motivated death of a black man: Brewer and two friends beat James Byrd Jr., chained him to the back of a truck, dragged him for several miles, and dumped his decapitated body near a cemetery. Brewer admitted he was involved in the attack but denied that he killed Byrd. Unsurprisingly, protesters and activists were not as apt to call for the courts to save Brewer’s life.

From a moral standpoint, it’s much easier for people to speak out against the execution of Davis than of Brewer. The dialogue surrounding Davis’ execution focused on the amount of doubt remaining in his case — the outrage was that an innocent man was being put to death. But the divergent reaction to the Brewer execution shows that the general public still supports the death penalty in some instances. Based on these reactions, Americans seem to be more concerned with the innocence of individual death row inmates, rather than challenging the morality of the death penalty in general.

One of the arguments against the death penalty is its permanence; even if the person is later exonerated, it is impossible to retract punishment once the execution has been carried out. In this way, the question of innocence is obviously important in the fight to abolish the death penalty. People wanted justice for Troy Davis — but would they have been just as outraged about his execution if he were definitely guilty?

As Brendan O’Neill wrote in The Telegraph,

The airbrushing of Brewer from yesterday’s heated discussions on the death penalty speaks volumes about the Troy Davis campaign. It seems pretty clear that it was motivated, not by a principled, across-the-board opposition to the state killing of citizens, but rather by campaigners’ desire to indulge in some very public moral preening. Unlike the Brewer execution, which was ugly and complicated, the Davis execution could be squeezed into a cozy moral narrative in which the state of Georgia was depicted as backward and racist and those who opposed the execution of Davis presented themselves as purer than pure, good and decent, and more than willing to prove it by writing tweets of concern every four or five minutes. What message should we take from this disparity in campaigning? That Troy Davis did not deserve to die but Lawrence Brewer did? Such moral flightiness, such brutal arbitrariness, reveals much about today’s very changeable campaigners against the death penalty.

The dialogue — or lack thereof — surrounding Wednesday’s executions reinforces the notion that most Americans still support the death penalty in some cases. A Rasmussen Reports poll from June found that 63 percent of Americans support the death penalty, and only 25 percent oppose it.

This position differs from the international norm. According to the latest capital punishment statistics, only 23 countries carried out executions in 2010. China, Iran, North Korea, and Yemen — countries with notorious human rights records — topped the list of the most executions last year, along with the United States. Despite the controversy surrounding the Troy Davis case, it is still unlikely that the United States will join the rest of the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and many others in abolishing the death penalty.

Amnesty International, which led the protests and vigils in the Davis case, fundamentally opposes the death penalty in all instances. The Troy Davis case became the focus in the fight against capital punishment in part because the glaring inconsistencies made his specific case particularly outrageous and heartbreaking. It is much more complicated to make the public sympathetic to a white supremacist like Brewer, even though Amnesty and others opposed his execution as well. The Amnesty website contained a brief mention of Brewer’s execution: “On the same day, Lawrence Brewer was also executed in Huntsville, Texas. He was sentenced to death for his role in the killing of James Byrd, Jr. in June 1998. Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases, without exception.” Despite this assertion, Amnesty clearly did not mobilize around the Brewer case to the same extent they did for Davis.

While the Troy Davis execution engaged the nation in the death penalty debate, the event might not mobilize the general public in the broader fight to completely abolish the death penalty. Americans are calling for justice, but killing U.S. citizens is still considered “just” in the minds of many people.

The Davis case is indeed tragic, but the greater tragedy is that the United States will most likely continue the practice of killing people convicted of crimes — whether or not they are guilty.

Troy Davis’ Execution Nears

In the final hours of a years-long fight to save Troy Davis’ life, human rights activists have intensified efforts to prevent the execution of a most likely innocent man. The prospects, however, look increasingly bleak.

Davis’ lawyers have been scrambling for any possible solutions, but the only remaining chance to stop the execution is through the courts — a highly unlikely scenario. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency Tuesday morning, and other desperate efforts have also failed. As AP writes,

His backers also have resorted to far-fetched measures: offering for Davis to take a polygraph test, urging prison workers to strike or call in sick, posting a judge’s phone number online, urging people to call and ask him to put a stop to the 7 p.m. execution. They’ve even considered a desperate appeal for White House intervention.

So far, these efforts have proven futile. Their probable failure will be, to say the least, drastically demoralizing to human rights activists who have rallied around this case in the fight against capital punishment.

While many people are executed on unfair grounds, the Davis case is significant because of glaring inconsistencies in the evidence that was used to convict him. Davis was convicted in 1991 of murdering Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail in 1989; the verdict, however, has drawn criticism due to shifting, changing testimonies and the lack of physical evidence. In the two decades since his trial, all but two of the state’s non-police witnesses have recanted their testimonies — and one of those who has held onto his testimony is the principle alternative suspect. In a country that claims to pride itself on justice, Davis’ guilt is blatantly uncertain.

Amnesty and other human rights groups deemed Sept. 16 the International Day of Solidarity for Troy Davis, and hundreds of thousands of people held vigils and other events to urge the Georgia board to grant him clemency. The case has drawn the attention of notable figures like Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, and Pope Benedict XVI. Evidently, even the high profile nature of the cause was not enough to halt the execution.

Davis’ supporters are refusing to back down, even as the last shreds of hope disappear. Activists have been holding more protests and vigils on his behalf, begging for last-minute intervention. They are calling the parole board, raising awareness, and holding signs saying, “Not in my name!”

Meanwhile, Davis has refused a last meal and has said he would like to spend his last hours with friends, family, and supporters.

If the execution happens, it will mark a huge blow for the community that has mobilized around Davis for years. It could send the message that grassroots organizing, petitions, and vigils are ineffective. Davis’ death will prove how unfair and unjust our “justice” system is, and it will make many people feel completely powerless to change it.

Additionally troubling is the message Davis’ execution sends to the rest of the world. His case has garnered considerable international attention. The United States is one of 139 countries with the death penalty, but we are one of only 23 countries that carried out executions in 2010. Always striving to be at the top, we were among the countries with the most executions in 2010 — along with China, Iran, North Korea, and Yemen. Our penchant for killing people puts us among countries with notorious human rights records, thereby weakening our claims for international morality.

Foreign bodies have opposed how the U.S. justice system is handling Davis’ case. The Council of Europe, among other groups, has called for his sentence to be commuted. Renate Wohlwend of the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly said, “To carry out this irrevocable act now would be a terrible mistake which could lead to a tragic injustice.”

Most death penalty cases do not get nearly as much global attention as Troy Davis; therefore, his execution will further hurt our reputation as a nation. But aside from what the international community thinks of Davis’ death, perhaps the greater question is what his execution — and countless others every year — do to us as a country.

Columnist Leonard Pitts wrote that this case in particular shows how bloodthirsty our nation can be: “But that need to see death — the inability to imagine how justice can be had without it — is compelling. Indeed, there can be little doubt that is what is driving Troy Davis toward execution.” His observation is particularly salient as Texas Gov. Rick Perry draws praise instead of criticism for his record of overseeing 234 executions at a recent Republican presidential debate.

The widow of Mark MacPhail, the slain police officer, said earlier this week, “It’s time for justice. We need our justice.”

But what kind of justice is served if a man is killed for a crime he did not commit?

Hours away from execution, Troy Davis released a statement that echoes his supporters’ dedication:

“The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me. I’m in good spirits and I’m prayerful and at peace. But I will not stop fighting until I’ve taken my last breath. Georgia is prepared to snuff out the life of an innocent man.”