On Wednesday, Troy Davis, a man who may well have been innocent of the crime for which he was convicted, was executed.
Troy Davis was accused of killing Mark MacPhail, a Georgia police officer. Seven of the nine principal prosecution eyewitnesses changed all or part of their testimony, many alleging police coercion in getting their testimony. In addition, three witnesses claimed that another man, Sylvester “Redd” Coles, had confessed the murder. To the end, Troy Davis steadfastly maintained his innocence. I believe there is certainly reasonable doubt that Troy committed the crime he was accused of. (Further information about the case, for those who have not been following the story, is available at Amnesty International.)
However, a perfect storm of kyriarchial shit got Troy Davis’s way.
The death penalty is one of the starkest examples of discrimination around class, race, ability and gender in our society. People of color constitute 25% of the population and 43% of the people executed; 80% of people executed are convicted of murders of white people, even though white people and black people are murdered at equal rates. 5-10% of death row inmates have severe mental illnesses; many have experienced physical or sexual abuse and nearly all suffer from brain damage due to injury or trauma. Almost all people on death row are too poor to afford a lawyer during their trials.
Women commit 10% of all murders, receive 2% of the death sentences and account for 1% of death row inmates. Differences in the type of crime explain a lot of the disparity: women are more likely to murder family members, while men are more likely to be involved in death-penalty crimes like cop-killing and murder during the commission of a robbery. However, that is not the complete explanation: women commit 30% of spousal murders and are 15% of the people executed for killing their spouses.
As a black man in the criminal justice system, Troy Davis de facto has no reasonable doubt that he committed the crime he was accused of. After all, he’s black! And male! The facts didn’t seem to play much of a role in the matter at all.
I have been drafting this post for days. I have tried to say something insightful. Something about the prison-industrial complex, or about the culture of violence, or about the racist and misandric assumption that black men are criminals, violent, beasts that are unable to control themselves. Perhaps an incisive discussion how this case perfectly illustrates bell hooks’s fascinating theory, in Black Men and Masculinity, that treating the black male as “uncivilized brutes without the capacity to feel complex emotions… fear or remorse” (48) serves to justify a racist system of subjugation.
But to be honest I can’t. Because what I’m feeling right now is rage.
I am angry at the failures of the criminal justice system. I am angry because I support civil liberties, the presumption of innocence, reasonable doubt, due process, everything Troy Davis was denied. I am angry because a murderer might get away. I am angry because an innocent man might have died. Might have been murdered.
I have had to stand up and walk away from this post so many times. It’s hard to type through tears.
I am a white woman, but Troy Davis is my brother, the way all black men are my brothers, the way, under our skin, we are all family. The same DNA lies in our cells, the same blood runs in our veins. Injustice perpetrated against one of us is injustice perpetrated against all of us. As long as one of us is oppressed, no human being is free.
Troy Davis is why I fight for social justice. Social justice isn’t some academic wankery or an Internet game. Social justice is about real people who are really in pain. Racism kills; homophobia kills; sexism kills; transphobia kills; ableism kills. People die because we are incapable of overcoming our animal instincts to divide the world into Us and Not Us, because we need these little groups to classify people into, The Other and Not Like Us and Just Not Our Sort Dear.
But there is another way. Thousands of years ago, the playwright Terence wrote one of the most beautiful sentences ever spoken: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. For those of you who don’t speak Latin (pah), it means: “I am human; I consider nothing human alien to me.”
Social justice is the struggle to make that sentence a reality. Ordinary human beings, trying to overcome our tendency to only see black skin or male secondary sexual characteristics, trying to see nothing human as alien to us. We fail: oh, God, do we fail. But that doesn’t make it any less necessary to try. Social justice is a history of failures trying to be, if not right, at least a little bit less wrong.
On Wednesday night, a man said, “for those about to take my life, God have mercy on your souls. And may God bless your souls.” At 11:08 PM, he died. To the end, he professed his innocence.
It was a failure of justice. But that failure doesn’t mean we should give up. It means it’s time to keep fighting.
(If you have extra money, you may want to consider donating to The Innocence Project, which works to free wrongfully convicted people. There is a link on the sidebar.)
BH, previous enslavement isn’t the issue. “The Irish and the Chinese never were enslaved, is my point.’ The issue is the historical use of discrimination in the criminal justice system as a means of maintaining the Jim Crow caste system, which come to think of was a modern-day, socialized form of enslavement in place of the previous private model the South had. This whole affair reeks of the Jim Crow mentality and culture. The reason this situation is not analogious to what the Irish or the Chinese face (and unlike what black people STILL face) is that we Irish took… Read more »
@Simon Nope, there is no grey when it comes to doing it. The grey comes in with the situations of why we should or shoudnt do it. I have a hard time listening to the people who agree with the execution of Troy Davis(pretty sickening actually). I also have a problem with the people who dont think Clifford Olson should be executed(In his case it looks like nature finally will take its place). In regards to Olson, he made it 100% clear he would do it again if given the opportunity. Considering its not 100% certain we can keep people… Read more »
Titfortat: Well there ain’t no grey in the executin’ of a man, now is there? Last I knew, ya don’t half-execute people. Ya don’t, like, 10% execute ’em then let ’em serve out a 20-year stretch being 10% dead. The execution of a convict is a black-or-white thing. Either they’re going to the hangman’s noose/chair/whatever, or they’re not, and they’re left behind bars for the rest of their natural lives. I remember a quote from an old Wolverine comic “I ain’t 100% sure [some other character]’s lying. I gotta be 100% sure, ‘cos if I kill him, he’s 100% dead”.… Read more »
All or nothing. It seems that most people see the world in black or white when it comes to the death penalty. So much for all the grey out here.
“Are you familiar with the engineering concept of “acceptable risk”?……. The criminal justice system is same way. ” Now that’s what I call loss of perspective! “There’s no such thing as perfect justice, so there’s always a chance that we might get it wrong. ” Exactly! And THAT is why there should be no irrevocable decisions made based on an imperfect decision making process – especially if they result in execution. “This doesn’t mean we can throw up our hands and give up.” Nobody is saying we should give up the justice system. We should however abandon the death penalty… Read more »
Which would you rather condone? Spending a lot of money? Or murdering innocent people to save cash? Because in a society that executes criminals and doesn’t have magical infallible truth-detecting telepaths, innocents will die by the hands of duly elected officials. That is something I believe no right-thinking person can consider a moral choice. Are you familiar with the engineering concept of “acceptable risk”? We already make lots of decisions that cost the lives of innocent people in order to save money. Consider the victims of an earthquake. It’s possible to build buildings that can withstand the forces of the… Read more »
Oh, and D!D!D!, it’s flat out incorrect to say that 9 people saw Troy Davis shoot a man. Only 7 people ever claimed they saw the actual event; of those 7 all but 2 have recanted their testimony. And one of those 2 is likely the guy who actually did it.
Plus the two guys from jail who claimed Troy confessed to them ALSO admitted that the police pressured them into it.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/cases/usa-troy-davis
And yet they created an entire musical culture known across the world and heavily influenced modern pop music. That goes to show that creativity can and often did grow out of oppression.
Not to mention that black people are unique in that they came to America with absolutely zero money or resources, and also were actively put down until the 1960s in most places and are still being discriminated against to a far greater degree than most other groups.
The Irish and the Chinese never were enslaved, is my point.
“And why is it that other marginalized groups have managed to do so well in America? Not everything that is wrong in this world is the result of white racism.”
Huh, D! D! D!?
First, few groups in the history of the United States have been as marginalized as African Americans, and those who have aren’t doing “so well”, like Native Americans, certain types of Latino Americans, and other victims of significant ethnic or racial hatreds.
All groups aren’t treated equally by racists, and there’s inequality in the degree of inequality they create.
goshawk = most amount of sense per pixel
goshawk: Actually, the death penalty is more expensive than lifetime imprisonment, because of the cost of appeals.
Re: evidence and uncertainty, I know I already posted this link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=1 but I really would like to talk up the article a bit more. It’s about Cameron Todd Willingham, a man who was executed in Texas after having been convicted of committing arson upon his own home with the intent to murder his children, who died in the fire. For just a fraction of the facts presented in the article, which is in-depth, super-long but ABSOLUTELY worth your time, here is a quick video with the author of the article: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/08/video-flashover.html Essentially, this man was convicted based upon a… Read more »
It doesn’t matter if Troy Davis was guilty – it matters that there’s doubt. It matters that people on Death Row keep getting acquitted on better evidence. It matters that no justice system is infallible. We can wrap it in the trappings of ritual all we want, but execution is about vengeance, not justice. If there is no certain, fail-safe means of determining guilt or innocence, then state-sanctioned execution in a democratic society makes every participant in that society a party to murder. Execution makes you and me murderers. Justice isn’t about dishing it back to those who’ve wronged us,… Read more »
My cop friend agrees that eyewitnesses are great for persuading juries, and damn near worthless for determining the actual truth. There are ways to make them more reliable, but almost no police departments use those ways.
Any death penalty is legalized murder as far as I’m concerned.
Just because the state does it doesn’t make it any less of a murder. In fact it’s far worse because murder committed by an individual is nearly always motivated by some extreme situation that is at least partially understandable. While executions are implemented by bureaucrats who are in their cosy offices paid by the hour signing off and stamping documents. They have no motivation at all.
D3: I didn’t write about Brewer because Brewer was not most likely innocent (see f’s excellent comment); however, as a death penalty opponent, I oppose him getting killed too.
Eyewitness testimony is much, much less reliable than you’d think. And juries working off of “common sense” assumptions tend to place much more trust in eyewitnesses than the research suggests they ought to. Experimental psychologists have been working on this issue for a long time, but it’s only been an influential factor in criminal trials for about 10 years. Here’s an introduction to some of the research and the problems it brings up, which I found useful as a layperson: http://www.slate.com/id/2254054/ Here’s an article about new guidelines for witness questioning, from the year 2000: http://www.apa.org/monitor/jan00/pi4.aspx Here are the guidelines themselves:… Read more »
I fear that we would have a generation of addicts then, and the rest of society would be footing the bill. I agree that a change in tactics is warranted, but I’m not sure that I want people to be able to buy meth on every street corner.(D.D.D)
Funny thing is, on both counts, you do and can. 🙁
Troy Davis is a terrible tragedy but that doesnt mean that the death penalty should be completely abolished. In certain cases it is the humane thing to do for both the perpetrator and the public.(imo)
I’m against capital punishment because it doesn’t deter criminals and the way it’s applied in the US is especially stupid : the most dangerous murderers are usually not condemned to death and it’s mainly stupid and unlucky people that are condemned to death.
D! D! D!: Yeah? What *about* Lawrence Russell Brewer? Nasty Racist hater gets fried, we’re supposed to be up in arms about it? Okay, that’s cruel. My point is, I wouldn’t see a death penalty as vengeance. I remember a quote (though not its source) “Hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he is, all he’s ever gonna be.” Take from that what you will. As to Davis himself, I don’t know the facts. I can’t say for sure that he did it, or he was framed. I can’t even tell you who to ask the… Read more »
No fewer than 9 people, including a group of active-duty airmen, saw a man that they later identified as Tory Davis shoot a father of two in the face. Only two of the eyewitnesses later said anything that contradicted this account, and Davis’ defense refused to call them as witnesses during the lengthy judiciary review of this case. Simply put, Davis was most likely guilty. I also have to ask about this week’s other newsworthy execution. What about Lawrence Russell Brewer? guest: Because black people are more likely than white people to be poor, due to both current institutionalized racism… Read more »
I honestly agree with Darque and Nancy Lebovitz. Most confessions are coerced; they’re the least reliable forms of evidence. And we should not be executing anyone, least of all someone who was plausibly innocent. But I just get the feeling there’s some kind of elephant in the room here about being violent=being a man that no-one seems willing to talk about.
“And I’m curious to know what makes you think he was stupid.”
Before he was arrested for the murder of the cop, Troy Davis was previously arrested for and plead guilty to a concealed weapons offense.
On the subject of rehabilitation, getting some balance on parole boards might be a good idea. The board of pardons and paroles which considered Mr. Davis’s plea for clemency was a former law enforcement officer, two former corrections officials, a former prosecutor, and former (GOP) state legislator. This sort of stacking is not uncommon. Given the nature of parole boards, it’s likely Mr. Davis would have died in prison even without the death penalty or even life without parole. Model inmate, takes bible study classes, judged unlikely to reoffend, admits wrongdoing and expresses remorse, donates money from prison work to… Read more »