Fasting With Troy Davis on 9/21

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied Troy Davis's request for clemency. It appears that Georgia will kill him by lethal injection at 7 pm ET on September 21, 2011. And it appears that execution cannot be stopped.

From Ben Jeanlous at the NAACP an eloquent, moving request that we fast tomorrow evening and mark the time of Troy Davis's execution:

This morning, our worst fears came true. Despite widespread doubt, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles upheld the decision to execute Troy Davis this Wednesday.

Still, Troy has refused to have a “last meal.” He has faith his life will be spared.

In the past, his tremendous faith has been rewarded. The last time Troy faced execution, in 2008, the warden brought in what was to be his last meal. But Troy refused to eat. Looking the prison staff in their eyes, he explained this meal would not be his last. He was vindicated when he received a last minute stay. Guards still remember this as a haunting moment, one rooted in Troy’s deep faith.

Still, there is every sign the state of Georgia intends to execute Troy this time--despite calls for them to stop by everyone from the former head of the FBI, William Sessions, to former US President Jimmy Carter.

Troy has prepared himself, and to the extent anyone can, his family, for either outcome.

As he has said many times "They can take my body but not my spirit, because I have given my spirit to God."

Thus, even as we continue to call on the Board of Pardons and Parole and Savannah District Attorney Larry Chisolm to reconsider, we must be prepared for either outcome too.

Please stand with Troy and his family. Join NAACP activists around the country in an evening of solidarity, prayer and fasting on Wednesday, September 21st.

http://action.naacp.org/StandWithTroy

Ask friends to meet up. Ask your family to fast Wednesday evening in solidarity with Troy's family and use the dinner hour to talk. Ask your faith community, if they already have a Wednesday night fellowship planned, to make time for conversation about Troy’s scheduled execution.

However you do it, please mark the 7 o’clock hour on that evening—the time of Troy’s scheduled execution—as a moment to reflect on Troy’s experience, to offer prayers for his family and that of Officer MacPhail, and to talk about what we can each do to ensure our nation never does this again.

This is a moment to rededicate ourselves to the struggle to end the death penalty and otherwise fix our nation's broken justice system.

To honor Troy’s courage, and rededicate ourselves to the cause of justice in America, NAACP activists are asked to fast Wednesday evening. Will you join us?

I am Troy Davis. I will fast on Wednesday evening. I will stand in solidarity with all of the others who consider the state's killing of Troy Davis a lawless, barbarous, inhumane, unjust and disgraceful act. Please join me.

An Outrage In Georgia

The Georgia Pardon and Parole Board has DENIED clemency to Troy Davis. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports:

The state Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday has denied clemency for Troy Anthony Davis after hearing pleas for mercy from Davis' family and calls for his execution by surviving relatives of a murdered Savannah police officer.

Davis' case has already taken more unexpected turns than just about any death-penalty case in Georgia history and his innocence claims have attracted international attention. Its resolution was postponed once again when the parole board late Monday announced it would not be making an immediate decision as to whether Davis should live or die.

Davis, 42, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the state prison in Jackson.

I doubt there are other legal steps that can stop the state from killing Troy Davis.

My heart goes out to Troy Davis and his family, and also to the McPhail family. They all deserve better.

I Am Troy Davis

Dublin, 2010

On September 21, 2011, the State of Georgia plans to kill Troy Davis by lethal injection. Again. This is the fourth time the State of Georgia has scheduled Davis for death. In 2007 he was spared with less than 24 hours notice. In September 2008, the hearse was waiting at the door and he was less than two hours away from the gurney. A month later the execution was halted three days before execution. And now, the rollercoaster from hope to despair has come to September 21, 2011.

Troy Davis’s conviction stems from the 1989 death of a Savannah police officer, Mark Allen McPhail. The rollercoaster, for Troy Davis and his family and for the family of the officer, has been lurching back and forth for 22 years. And with each year, doubt about the conviction has grown as witnesses have recanted and as jurors spook their unresolved doubts. Lurking in the background is alarming possibility that the wrong man is waiting for the needle and that the real murderer has escaped.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports:

With only days before his scheduled execution, an effort to spare convicted killer Troy Davis is gathering thousands in rallies, vigils and other last-minute events from Atlanta to Peru to Berlin.

Citing doubts about his guilt, national leaders of the NAACP and Amnesty International led hundreds in a protest Friday against executing the man a Georgia jury said killed a Savannah police officer in 1989. Amnesty International declared a Global Day of Solidarity for Troy Davis, with 300 events across the United States and the globe, including in New York, Washington D.C., San Diego, Paris and Oslo.

Former President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu are among those calling for his execution to be halted. And this week, Davis supporters presented 663,000 petitions to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles asking for his life to be spared.

Troy Davis has one last chance to ask for leniency. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, which has the sole authority in Georgia to commute death sentences, will meet Monday to consider Davis’s case.

That means that this weekend is the last opportunity to sign a petition and to stand with more than 600,000 others for sparing Troy Davis.

The petition is here.

Details about the case are here from 2006 and here from 2008.

An excellent first person view is here (h/t OPOL).

State Killing: Georgia Saves A Prisoner's Life So It Can Kill Him

As long as there is a death penalty in the United States, as long as the government persists in the barbaric practice of having the state kill those convicted of the most egregious murders, as long as the government continues to kill by lethal injection, there will continue to be egregious, shameful, disgraceful, inhuman, unfathomable executions.

Last week it was the Virginia execution of Teresa Lewis, a woman with a 72 IQ who was not the shooter in the double murder that led to her execution on Thursday. The two male gunmen each received life in prison. Little, whose guilt was never in doubt, pleaded guilty, waived her right to a jury trial on punishment, and to her then attorney's surprise, was sentenced to death by a judge without a jury. The judge said she was the "head of the serpent." I wrote that if this execution was justice, justice was an ass.

And now Georgia plans on executing Brandon Rhode on Monday.

Rhode, too, committed a horrendous, brutal multiple murder. Rhode killed two children and their father in the course of a burglary. The Atlanta Journal Constitution described the crime:

Rhode... and a partner, did not set out to commit murder when they broke into the Jones County house of Steven and Gerri Ann Moss on April 23, 1998, according to trial testimony.

Their plan was to commit a burglary.

But 11-year-old Bryan was murdered when he came home from school, then his 15-year-old sister, Kristin, and then their 37-year-old father, Steven Moss....

Bryan Moss was the first to come home.

The boy could see the two men through a front window as they were ransacking the house. The boy, armed with a baseball bat, came in through the back, but he was subdued by Rhode and Lucas, who were armed.

They put him in a chair as they discussed what to do with him. They were still talking about their options when Lucas shot the boy in the shoulder.

Moments later, Kristin Moss was seen coming up to the house, so Lucas took Bryan to a back bedroom while Rhode waited for the boy’s sister.

Rhode put her in the same chair and shot the teenager twice.

Simultaneously, Lucas, in the back with Bryan, shot the boy again.

Rhode shot and killed their father when he got to the house.

Then the partners shot the Moss siblings several more times to be certain they were dead.

There was never a serious dispute that Rhode was guilty of the crime, and Georgia was scheduled to kill Rhode was scheduled by lethal injection. According to a CBS report, Rhode tried to kill himself on Friday before the State of Georgia could kill him:

A federal judge has refused to block tonight's scheduled execution of a Georgia death row inmate who attempted to commit suicide on Tuesday, the day he was originally to be put to death.

According to court filings, 31-year-old Brandon Joseph Rhode used a razor to slash his elbows and his neck, which caused him to go into traumatic shock. Authorities say Rhodes may have also suffered brain damage as a result of immense blood loss.

Rhode was stabilized after his attempt and he's since been put in a restraining chair to prevent him from pulling out the sutures on his neck or doing any other harm to himself, a state attorney said.

Rhode's execution had already been rescheduled to 9:00 a.m. Friday after his suicide attempt, but the state moved his execution back 10 hours to 7:00 p.m. Friday, to allow for several appeals to work their way through the system, says corrections spokeswoman Sharmelle Brooks.

The execution has now been scheduled for Monday. And Georgia has reportedly put two additional guards on Rhode, so that nothing further will disrupt the state's killing him as scheduled. So in Rhode's case, the state finds itself saving Rhode's life so that it can strap him on a gurney and kill him by lethal injection.

There's a grim irony to this. Some prisoners condemned to death "volunteer" to be executed. They withdraw all of their appeals, they tell their lawyers not to seek a stay, they tell prison officials to schedule their execution. They give up. And they are killed. There are many reasons that this happens, and it happens frequently. Chief among the reasons for "volunteering" are the dehumanizing conditions on death row and the knowledge that eventually the state will succeed in killing by lethal injection. Prisoners just give up. That kind of suicide is acceptable on death rows across the country. It is a common occurrence. In fact, the list of those scheduled for execution released by various abolition organizations puts an asterisk next to these "volunteers" names, or states they are volunteers. That kind of suicide is permissible.

But Rhode's suicide evidently is not acceptable. He didn't create a legal framework for the state to kill him, he tried to do it without the state's participation. He tried to do it himself. And this, of course, could not be permitted. So now we have the spectacle of Georgia having saved his life, having stitched him up, having strapped him to a chair, having assigned additional guards, for what? So that Georgia can kill him in our names on Monday.

Put another way, Rhode had no regard for the lives of his victims. He has no regard for his own life. And now, because of the intervention of Georgia prison authorities, we are about to reduce ourselves to his level: we too have no regard for his life.

Yet again, the death penalty reduces all of us to the lowest common denominator of barbarism.

State Killing Recommences In Georgia

This disgusting, barbarous event will be overlooked in the news about the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina.

This evening Georgia resumed killing its prisoners by lethal injection. William Earl Lynd has been executed. This is the 1100th execution in the modern era and the first following the Supreme Court's ruling in Baze v. Rees, upholding Kentucky's lethal injection protocol. It has been almost 8 months since a state killed a prisoner. This is longest amount of time between executions since at least the early nineties.

Convicted Georgia prisoner William Earl Lynd was executed Tuesday, the first inmate to be put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted its nationwide ban on executions.

Lynd was pronounced dead at 7:51 pm at the Diagnostic and Classification prison in Jackson, Georgia as anti-death penalty activists stood in quiet protest outside.

According to prison officials, Lynd had been “somber all day,” and had requested a mild sedative before being lead to the death chamber.

Lynd had been convicted for the 1988 kidnapping and murder of live-in girlfriend Ginger Moore.
source

The crime was an extremely brutal one, and Lynd waited on death row for almost 20 years to be killed while he appealed.

Tonight, almost 2 decades later, Georgia executed him by lethal injection. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that "he was the 41st man Georgia has executed since 1983, the 19th by lethal injection." He was 53 years old.

Barbarism and revenge killing have returned to the US. I want it to be understood that William Earl Lynd was not killed in my name. I detest killing. I detest Lynd's killing his victim. My heart goes out to the victim, her family, Lynd, Lynd's family, the lawyers who defended and prosecuted him, the jurors who deliberated his case, the judges who ruled at his trial and appeals, those who wrote and those who read the newspaper coverage of the crime and the trial and the execution, in fact, everyone who had knowledge of this case or any contact with it. How can we live with ourselves when to revenge a killing, we permit our government to kill?

Mahatama Gandhi correctly identified the issue. "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."

Spare Troy Davis

crossposted at dailyKos

Sometimes a death penalty case comes along that is much more upsetting than the usual one. Of course, this depends on what upsets you. Personally, I think all executions are barbaric and they should be banned. And I find each one extremely upsetting. But even those who aren't absolutists like me find particular executions upsetting. Some executions, for example, of retarded people, of people under 18 at the time of their crime, upset even a majority of the Supreme Court so much that they prohibited such killings. But a majority of the Supreme Court isn't often upset by judicial killing and it often enables it. State killing continues, approved by the Supreme Court and the governments in more than 30 states.

Sometimes, a death penalty case comes along in which it looks for all the world like an innocent person is about to be executed. Sometimes the Supreme Court washes its hands of that case, turns its back, and diddles while somebody is fastened to the gurney.

Which brings me to Troy Anthony Davis and the efforts of Georgia to execute him on July 17, 2007, even though there are substantial doubts about his guilt of the crime.


Troy Anthony Davis

Amnesty International provides the following brief synopsis (which I have edited; my comments are inserted in brackets)

On 28 August 1991 Troy Davis [who is an African American] was convicted of the
murder of 27-year-old Officer Mark Allen McPhail,
white, who was shot and killed in the parking lot of a
Burger King in Savannah, Georgia,
in the early hours of 19 August 1989. Troy Davis was
also convicted of assaulting Larry Young, a homeless
man, who was accosted and struck across the face with
a pistol immediately before Officer McPhail was shot.
At the trial, Troy Davis admitted that he had been at
the scene of the shooting, but claimed that he had
neither assaulted Larry Young nor shot Officer
McPhail.

There was no physical evidence against Troy Davis and
the weapon used in the crime was never found. The case
against him consisted entirely of witness testimony.
In affidavits signed over the years since the trial,
all but three of the state's non-police witnesses have
recanted their testimony. One of the three
non-recanting witnesses is a man who has not been
located for interview by Davis' appeal lawyers.
Another, while not recanting, has contradicted her
trial testimony. The third non-police witness who has
not recanted his testimony is Sylvester Coles, who was
the principle alternative suspect, according to the
defense at the trial, and against whom there is new
witness testimony implicating him as the gunman.

All of the others have recanted their testimony against Troy
Davis. In 1989, Kevin McQueen was detained in the same
jail as Davis. McQueen told the police that during
this time Troy Davis had confessed to shooting Officer
McPhail. [This is classic jailhouse snitch testimony
and it is notoriously unreliable.] In a 1996 affidavit,
McQueen retracted this
statement, saying that he had given it because he
wanted to "get even" with Davis following a
confrontation he said the two of them had had. Monty
Holmes testified against Troy Davis in a pre-trial
hearing, but did not testify at the trial because,
according to a 2001 affidavit, he did not want to
repeat his false testimony. Jeffrey Sapp testified
that Troy Davis had told him that he had shot the
officer. Recanting his testimony in a 2003 affidavit,
he stated that under "a lot of pressure" from police,
he had testified against Troy Davis. [These recantations
occurred years after the jury trial that led to Davis's
death penalty.]

At the trial, eyewitness Dorothy Ferrell identified
Troy Davis as the person who had shot Officer McPhail.
In a 2000 affidavit, she stated that she had not seen
who the gunman was, but testified against Davis out of
fear that if she did not, because she was on parole at
the time, she would be sent back to jail. In a 2002
affidavit, Darrell Collins, 16 years old at the time
of the crime, said that the day after the shooting, 15
or 20 police officers came to his house, and

"a lot of
them had their guns drawn". They took him in for
questioning, and "after a couple of hours of the
detectives yelling at me and threatening me, I finally
broke down and told them what they wanted to hear.
They would tell me things that they said had happened
and I would repeat whatever they said - I testified
against Troy at his trial - because I was still scared
that the police would throw me in jail for being an
accessory to murder if I told the truth about what
happened."

Larry Young, the homeless man who was accosted on the
night of the murder, implicated Troy Davis as the man
who had assaulted him. His affidavit, signed in 2002,
offers further evidence of a coercive police
investigation into the murder of their fellow officer:

"After I was assaulted that night - some police
officers grabbed me and threw me down on the hood of
the police car and handcuffed me. They treated me like
a criminal; like I was the one who killed the officer
- They made it clear that we weren't leaving until I
told them what they wanted to hear. They suggested
answers and I would give them what they wanted. They
put typed papers in my face and told me to sign them.
I did sign them without reading them."

In his 2002
affidavit he said that he "couldn't honestly remember
what anyone looked like or what different people were
wearing."

Antoine Williams, a Burger King employee, had just
driven into the restaurant's parking lot at the time the
shooting occurred. At the trial, he identified Troy
Davis as the person who had shot Officer McPhail. In
2002 he stated that this was false, and that he had
signed a statement for the police which he could not
and did not read:

"Even today, I know that I could not
honestly identify with any certainty who shot the
officer that night. I couldn't then either. After the
officers talked to me, they gave me a statement and
told me to sign it. I signed it. I did not read it
because I cannot read. At Troy Davis's trial, I
identified him as the person who shot the officer.
Even when I said that, I was totally unsure whether he
was the person who shot the officer. I felt pressured
to point at him because he was the one who was sitting
in the courtroom. I have no idea what the person who
shot the officer looks like."

Due to the procedural obstacles facing a death row
inmate seeking a hearing on post-conviction evidence,
Troy Davis has had no such hearing on the current
state of the witness testimony. At oral arguments in
front of a three-judge panel of the federal 11th
Circuit Court of Appeals in September 2005, one of the
judges expressed concern that Troy Davis had not been
granted a federal hearing to present the
post-conviction evidence. She asked, "If these people
say, "I was coerced by the police - how could [the
lower federal judge] reject that without a hearing?"
She reportedly suggested that without the testimony of
the various trial witnesses who had now recanted, the
state appeared to have no case. However, in September
2006, the 11th Circuit Court upheld the federal
judge's ruling, and on 25 June 2007 the US Supreme
court refused to intervene. For a full report on this
case, see USA: "Where is the justice for me?"

I'm not at all convinced that Troy Anthony Davis committed the murder for which Georgia plans to execute him on July 17, 2007. And I'm not alone in this. See this NY Daily News column, this from the Hill, and statements from others who have examined the case. Bishop Desmond Tutu and Sr. Helen Prejean agree. Given the state of the record, I doubt rational humans could argue that they are at all convinced-- forget about being convinced beyond a reasonable doubt-- that Troy Anthony Davis is guilty. No matter, according to the Hill

Georgia officials, however, consistently have said courts have looked at Davis’s arguments, and the state’s attorney general’s office has indicated it is comfortable with the decision to carry out the death sentence.

What is to be done? Time is extremely short. Amnesty suggests the following:

Please send appeals to arrive as
quickly as possible, in your own words:

- explaining that you are not seeking to condone the
murder of Officer Mark Allen McPhail, or to downplay
the seriousness of the crime or the suffering caused;

- noting that many of the witnesses who testimony was
used against Troy Davis at his trial have since
recanted their trial testimony, and that there is new
evidence against an alternative suspect in the case;

- noting the large number of wrongful convictions in
capital cases in the USA since 1976, and noting that
unreliability of witness testimony has been a
contributing factor in many of these cases;

- noting that the power of clemency in capital cases
exists as a failsafe against irreversible error that
the courts have been unable or unwilling to remedy;

- calling on the Board to commute the death sentence
of Troy Davis.

APPEALS TO:

State Board of Pardons and Paroles
2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, SE, Suite 458
Balcony Level, East Tower
Atlanta, Georgia 30334-4909
Fax: 1 404 651 8502
Email: webmaster@pap.state.ga.us
Salutation: Dear Board members

PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY

It is extremely important that each of us make it clear that this execution is not being carried out in our names. Please take a moment to email or write the George Board of Pardons and Paroles.