Georgia executes Troy Davis, spurning proof of his innocence

As millions grieve and vow to end racist death penalty

By Dianne Mathiowetz
Atlanta

Sep 22, 2011

Sept. 22 — It is the morning after the cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Troy Anthony Davis by the state of Georgia.

The internet and other forms of social media — as well as newspapers, radio and television — are filled with images of the thousands of people who gathered in cities across the U.S., around the world and outside the walls of the Jackson, Ga., prison that houses the death chamber.

Millions of people made phone calls and sent letters, tweets and emails, united in demanding that the execution of Davis be stopped. Appeals were made to all and anyone to intervene, from the warden and guards at the prison to President Barack Obama. The Supreme Court held up the execution for almost four hours, but then sealed Davis’s death without comment.

The facts of this case are well-known:

• Davis was tried in 1991 for the killing two years earlier of an off-duty Savannah police officer, Mark MacPhail.

• No physical or forensic evidence tying Davis to the shooting could be produced. The murder weapon was never found. There were no fingerprints, blood evidence or gunshot residue.

• The trial was held in Savannah, a Southern city where the site of a former massive slave market is a tourist area filled with boutiques and bars, and where the divisions between the areas where Black people live, and the Spanish-moss-draped parks and mansions of the city's elite, are stark.

• The prosecution relied on eyewitness testimony. Later seven of the nine witnesses recanted or altered their statements, citing police coercion, threats or intimidation.

• Nevertheless, Davis, a young Black man, was found guilty of killing the white police officer.

Davis always maintained his innocence. He proclaimed it again as he lie strapped to a gurney, waiting for the lethal injection to begin.

At every location where protests were held last night, Davis's own words to his supporters were repeated and reinforced.

In these last opportunities to speak about his pending death, while he maintained hope, he made clear that there have been other Troy Davises in the past — innocent people convicted and executed by a thoroughly racist and unfair judicial system. He directed his words to the other Troy Davises on death rows. And he spoke about the more than 2 million people held today in U.S. prisons and jails, so many just like him — young, coming from communities of color, workers, often poor.

Davis's message to all those who signed petitions, wrote letters, demonstrated and worked tirelessly to save his life is to transfer that passion and commitment to ending capital punishment in the U.S. and to always fight for justice.

Georgia’s brutal and racist history

Georgia has a long and bloody history. It begins with the importation and sale of African slaves and continues through the brutal forced removal of Cherokee and other Indigenous peoples on the Trail of Tears.

It stretches from the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, when 10,000 white men and boys rampaged through downtown Atlanta in a murderous frenzy, killing and beating Black people and burning down their businesses, to the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank by an anti-Jewish mob comprised of prominent Marietta leaders.

The days of Jim Crow segregation spawned the 1946 Ku Klux Klan killing of two Black couples at Moore's Ford Bridge. It was Georgia's capricious and arbitrary use of the death penalty, as revealed in the 1972 Furman case, that caused the Supreme Court to declare a moratorium on capital punishment. Subsequent Georgia cases before the highest court permitted the resumption of the death penalty and denied admission of historical patterns of racial bias as evidence.

Without a doubt, Georgia's red clay soil is stained with the blood of many, many victims of racism, poverty and bigotry.

Recent statistics show that Georgia has the third-highest poverty rate in the U.S. It ranks among the top states for foreclosures. Its unemployment figures are consistently higher than the national average. On every index of social well-being – from health to educational quality and so on — Georgia is near the bottom of the list.

The death penalty in Georgia goes back to the earliest colonial days, when capital punishment was directed at quashing resistance by those enslaved as well as at abolitionist organizing.

Capital punishment is the ultimate tool by an exploitative ruling class bent on maintaining its authority over all those whose labor provides its profits.

This blatant injustice after Davis's 22-year struggle to claim his innocence before numerous courts has torn away the veneer of due process and legality and revealed the ugliness of this class- and race-based judicial system.

In Troy Davis's name, the time for mass struggle, organization and resistance is NOW!

Postscript: On the morning of Sept. 22, the state of Georgia issued an execution warrant for Marcus Roy Johnson, to be carried out between Oct. 5 and 12.