I have always been opposed to the death penalty. I have hundreds of reasons, none of which are original, all of which feed neatly into my main reason, and that is that I think it’s wrong to kill people. I think it’s wrong to kill people during a war. I think it’s wrong to kill people during arguments or robberies or traffic stops. I think it’s wrong to kill people in public facilities. That’s my filter, and I’m a fundamentalist about it.
Something happened a few minutes before the killing was supposed to take place and the crowd erupted in cheers and in song. A woman who spoke with Amy Goodman – who deserves an award for the coverage, I think – said she was very grateful for the stay of execution granted by the U.S. supreme court. And then it was revealed that it wasn’t a stay at all but a little pause. The court was reviewing, or reconsidering, or something that for reasons I don’t understand caused the grizzly proceedings to stall, which seemed to me to make it only more grizzly. Hang on a second, I heard the voice of a judge say, but only in my head, let’s make sure one more time that we’ve got this right before we off this guy.
During the delay, there were several mentions of Clarence Thomas, who is not only black but from the same part of Georgia as Troy Davis. This was discussed by many in a tentatively hopeful way that I found ominous. Excerpts of Amy Goodman’s earlier conversations with Troy Davis’s two sisters and his nephew were played. One hour went by and then two. Every passing minute, said many, constituted a miracle. One of the most harrowing parts of the broadcast, for me, was the scream of sirens. “That cannot be a good sign,” someone said the first time the sirens wailed en masse. There were leaders of this and leaders of that – the NAACP, Amnesty International – and there were people who had traveled to the prison for the vigil and there were, of course, those who were personally involved, gathered across the street from the prison entrance. The sirens apparently were nothing more than an intimidation tactic, and even from a distance of 3,000 miles and the relative manageability of a radio, they worked. Those gathered held their candles and sang. Amy Goodman continued striking up conversations with people until the moment she said, in a voice that sounded barely her own, that the court had, with no dissent and in a single sentence, declined the invitation to intervene.
And man, the rest of it was quick.
To be fair, I don’t think there is a single fact that could dissuade me from my belief that the case against Troy Davis was so cracked with questions that I think the carrying out of the death warrant – the execution of it, if you will – is cause for serious alarm. Also in the spirit of fairness, I am not talking about whether or not he was guilty of murdering a man in Savannah in 1989. To me – and this should explain why it’s a good thing I am not an attorney – Troy Davis’ guilt or innocence is practically beside the point.
For the past many months I have been reading and listening and watching the tales of black people and white people in the south and the weird dance between the hundreds of mockeries made of fairness and equality in those states and the federal government in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I am not an expert by a long shot. I am just disturbed by what little I know. In the year of my birth, 1966, white people in Georgia kept black people in line by murdering them, raping them and inflicting terror on them in many other ways, and in the state of Georgia they carried their deeds out with the full support of many governmental institutions whose purpose, on paper, was and is to ensure that the concept of liberty and justice for all does not languish on the printed page. There is no shortage of documented cases where a group of black people was met with the fists and pistols and clubs of a group of white people infected with a brand of racism that I think can only be described as pathological. These encounters took place in settings ranging from dark country roads to the front steps of the courthouse. And then, when the police arrived – the ones in uniform – it was the black people who were charged, fined and jailed for disturbing the peace.
A mere 45 years later, regardless of its racial composition, trusting a commission or panel of citizens elected or appointed in a place such as Georgia to not be influenced by skin color when deciding if a person lives or dies strikes me as dangerously naïve. I don’t trust the citizens of our southern states to be responsible and ethical stewards of the law when the crime in question involves a black person and a white person for one simple reason: They are not trustworthy.
Why did the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Savannah Morning News refer to Troy Davis – as far back as 1992 – as ‘convicted cop killer’? Wouldn’t a simple ‘convicted killer’ have sufficed? In legal matters, I don’t think hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions should determine the outcome, but it’s curious to me that Jimmy Carter, the pope, archbishop Tutu and the many former federal officials of various political inclinations – including a former director of the FBI – were ignored. It’s even more curious to me that our president – who would blend in effortlessly on death row in nearly every state that has one – said absolutely nothing. Why were there so many questions about the witnesses recanting their testimony? I read a lot about witness intimidation. I read a lot about the lack of physical evidence. I read a lot about most of the case being built on a foundation of eyewitness accounts, which, according to any expert I’ve ever heard or read, is about as solid as mud.
I read, many times and in many places, that one of the witnesses who signed a statement implicating Troy Davis did so without reading it first because he is illiterate. I’d toss the whole thing based on that and that alone, but, as I’ve aptly demonstrated, a lawyer I am not.
Why did the guards and officers at the prison put on riot gear? Why, when Troy Davis was already inside the building where the killing was to take place, were the sirens heard so often throughout those hours of waiting for the court jesters to craft a single sentence? Why do these awful gatherings tend to be a sea of black faces? Why do the guards and the officials and the politicians announcing one thing and another tend to be white? Why do the cops show up at these things, regardless of the time of day (or night) wearing sunglasses that cover a third of their faces? What sort of perversion was behind the decision to have a black woman emerge from the homicide chamber to tell the watching, waiting world that Troy Davis, as of 11:08 p.m., was dead?
For me, the most unsettling aspect of the entire spectacle was not that Troy Davis died: It’s that his sister was alive enough to have realized, in a few swift minutes, that she had lost. Not her decade-long fight against cancer, but a fight, and an admirable one, waged against the centuries. It was she I thought of most for several days after the killing when I kept hearing and reading the phrase “justice has been served.” The words baffled me the same way that bumper stickers that say “Support Our Troops” do. What, exactly, do those words mean? Served to whom? And by whom? If justice is a master to be served, who are the servants? And what exactly are the terms of servitude? And are those terms nuanced, as so much else appears to be, by geography?
Though those four words may have been uttered in an unexamined way for the most part, for me the purpose they served was to flood my mind with images of Troy Davis’ sister. Listening to the narration on the radio the night of the killing was awful enough; looking at the images on the Internet the following morning was nearly unbearable. There were pictures of the sister from throughout the years, appearing in court rooms, marching, speaking, protesting and praying. Then, that Wednesday afternoon, her cancer-weary frame sitting in a wheelchair hours before her brother’s scheduled killing, speaking to a group that had gathered in a church near the prison. And finally, surrounded, shielded by a tight tangle of black arms and hands and bowed heads in a cordoned off area near the entrance to the building where her brother’s life, it had just been revealed, would soon end. In the images I saw spontaneous humaneness juxtaposed with brutal barbarism and I hoped that the very brave woman at the heart of that cocoon experienced, if only for a few moments, something that felt like safety.
