On September 21, at 11:08 pm Troy Davis was pronounced dead in a Georgia State prison after receiving a lethal injection. He was found guilty in 1991 for killing a police officer and had been on death row for the past 20 years. The details of his execution have been widely covered by many news sources, and a significant outpouring of grief on Twitter on the night of his execution made the hash-tags #troydavis and #toomuchdoubt, the top trending topics on the social networking site.
Why did one man receive so much attention from millions around the world? Over one million people had signed petitions to save his life through the hard work of organizations such as Amnesty International, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Davis embodied the fight to abolish the death penalty on September 21 and he was not the only person whose life was ended prematurely.
Although Davis was found guilty of murder during his original trial, he never once admitted to having committed the crime he was accused of. While this is not surprising for criminals and especially those on death row, Davis’ plea of innocence may have had a significant amount of truth.
For instance, at the time of his original trial, he was convicted purely on the eyewitness testimonies of nine individuals. Of these nine, seven either recanted or changed their testimony, citing police coercion as the primary reason for their initial accounts. Of the two that chose not to recant or change their testimonies, one was the other primary suspect in the case. What’s more is that the original trial had no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime. He was guilty because people thought they had seen him commit the crime. 20 years later, most of them weren’t so sure.
Perhaps this is why the #too-muchdoubt tag had such relevance to his case. No one could say, without a doubt, that Davis was guilty of the crime he was being killed for. In fact, many American politicians, such as Mark White (who oversaw 19 executions during his tenure as Governor of Texas), openly opposed using the death penalty on Davis because his case just had too much doubt and should have been reopened.
Personally, I hold no notions of whether Davis really did kill the officer in question. What I do know is that administering the death penalty is a decision that cannot be undone, and in this case, it shouldn’t have gone forward at all. If he was innocent as he claimed, the State of Georgia put an innocent man to death for a crime that he did not commit. Perhaps Voltaire was right when he wrote, “it is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.”
I have specifically noted Davis’ time of death because it deserves a valid note. Davis was scheduled to be executed at 7pm that night. However, an eleventh hour appeal to the United States Supreme Court delayed his execution in hopes that the Supreme Court would reopen his case for consideration. For four hours, Davis would not know whether he would live or die and neither would the rest of the world following his case. The justice system was entrusted with his life, and again, as many times before, it failed to pay its due diligence in serving its duty to one man.
The reality as it remains is this: the death penalty is on the run in much of the world and in the United States. Fewer and fewer societies are taking away the right to life through the use of stoning, firing squads, lethal injections and hangings. Hopefully, there will be a day when execution will no longer be seen as a valid form of punishment and we will not have to mourn for another Troy Davis.
