Troy Davis to Die Next Week: Will Georgia Execute an Innocent Man?

By Michelle Garcia, Amnesty International Magazine. Posted September
17, 2008.

The case of Troy Davis led to a global call to save his life. But in
Savannah, Georgia, a legacy of racism and fear has kept people silent.
Editor's Note: Troy Anthony Davis faces execution on September 23rd.
Go here to learn more.

Prison Boulevard begins on a lonely Georgia highway and sweeps across
lush grounds and a serene lake populated with ducks. One might expect
a sprawling ranch house at the end of this country road in Jackson,
but there rises instead the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification
prison, a mammoth institution whitewashed to a glare. To reach death
row inmates, visitors traverse a series of yellow iron gates opened
and shut in a chain reaction until they arrive at a guard holding open
a heavy door. Inside the long, narrow cell waits Troy Anthony Davis --
a man condemned for the 1989 murder of a Savannah police officer, and
an international cause -- wearing a prison-issue white and blue
uniform, electric blue sneakers and a wide smile.

A smile alarmingly disarming, jarring even, amid the banging echoes
from unknown corners. Davis, tall, broad and bald at age 39, settles
on a stool and begins to speak with a Georgia drawl and gesticulate,
and then he's drawing maps with his finger in the air and diagramming
the August night two decades ago that landed him on death row.

"I have to remember," says Davis emphatically. "Every day of my life,
I have to remember, to save my behind."

Last year, just 23 hours before Georgia officials would have executed
Davis by lethal injection, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and
Paroles issued a temporary stay of execution amid doubts about Davis'
guilt. By then the Savannah Morning News had gone to the presses with
reports of Davis' final meal, the standard prison supper. Peach state
and U.S. publications in other parts, however, published articles and
editorials cautioning that Georgia was preparing to execute a possibly
innocent man. The disparity in coverage mirrored the extreme
regionalism characteristic of the death penalty debate and exposed
growing fault lines between local support and attitudes across the
rest of the state and nation.

In Jackson, Davis throws open his arms and invites, "Ask me anything;
I have nothing to hide." He recalls the evening nearly two decades ago
that changed his life, during a time when crack cocaine was the rage
and murders werenÂ’t the solely the grist of true crimes tours through
Savannah's elegant neighborhoods or the garden of good and evil.

In 1991 a jury sentenced Davis to death for the August 19, 1989,
murder of Savannah police officer Mark Allen MacPhail in a Burger King
parking lot. Without a weapon or any physical evidence, prosecutors
relied largely on eyewitness testimony to persuade a jury that Davis
was the killer. In the years since, seven witnesses -- including
eyewitnesses -- have recanted or contradicted their earlier testimony.
Some said they fingered Davis as the killer under pressure from
police.

Since 2000, however, federal courts have denied his appeals for a new
trial, saying they are hamstrung by federal legislation passed after
his conviction that limits death row appeals. In March the Georgia
Supreme Court rejected his appeal for a new trial. In the 4--3 ruling,
the court said, "One who seeks to overturn his conviction for murder
many years later bears a heavy burden to bring forward convincing and
detailed proof of his innocence."

Davis' fate now falls to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles,
which can consider his appeal for clemency and commute his sentence to
life without parole once an execution date is set, likely by the end
of the year. His attorneys have also filed a habeas corpus petition
with the U.S. Supreme Court, but as one of thousands of petitions the
Court receives each year, his chance for a reprieve is remote.

Yet the Davis' case and its trajectory within the court system are
drawing intense scrutiny from afar, especially since the publication
last year of a 35-page report and a campaign by Amnesty International
that propelled Davis from relative obscurity to a cause backed by
celebrities, politicians and religious leaders, including the Pope. In
July, the European Union Parliament urged the United States to grant
Davis a retrial. Proponents of the death penalty, no less, have
rallied against his impending execution. William Sessions, former
director of the FBI, cautioned that executing Davis without
considering his evidence would be "intolerable." Even former U.S.
Representative and current Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr
(R-GA) weighed in. "True conservatives, as much as the most bleeding
heart liberals, should be unafraid to look carefully at such cases,"
wrote Barr in an August 2007 op-ed for the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. "Troy Davis' life is at stake; but so is the
credibility of our criminal justice system."

But in Savannah itself, a coastal town of 130,000 where segregation
persists, public support for Davis has been slow to ignite. Activists
point to a local "don't rock the boat" sensibility rooted in a bitter
racial history and deep small town ties.

After the Board of Pardons and Paroles issued the stay of execution in
March, a Savannah Morning News editorial urged the need for "closure."
Dave Gellatly, the white retired police chief and current county
commissioner voices a commonly held view when he says, "We waited 18,
19 years. He's had every right to every kind of appeal. He's had every
chance in the world. The fact of the matter is, it's gotten a lot of
news coverage, and you've had international organizations getting
involved. It had nothing to do with Savannah."

Around town, the name Troy Davis triggers a range of responses: the
blank stare, the quiet nodding, the "Oh that case." Young people who
were infants when Davis went to prison 17 years ago know the name and
the story as part of a generational history passed down from their
elders. Brandon, 20, a bellhop at a touristy hotel who heard about the
case from his barber and his uncle, says, "They said he didn't kill no
cop."

To Davis' family and supporters, local reticence has had significant
influence in the case, and that remains so as his execution date
approaches once again. Martina Correira, 41, Davis' sister and AI
anti-death penalty ambassador says, "If African American political
leaders had stepped up, it would have made a difference. They would
have got a lot of black people to listen, and they are voters. White
people came out and said what they had to say: 'Hang 'em high and kill
him.' Black people didn't do anything about it."

On July 4, the Davis family is gathered for a barbeque at Troy's
boyhood home in Cloverdale, a solidly middle class neighborhood of
African American families. Virginia Davis, Troy's mother, tends to the
low country boil on the stove (Cajun-spiced seafood and sausage), and
Lester, his younger brother, is on the grill cooking up ribs. Davis's
absence looms large, especially since rumors have swirled that the
district attorney might set an execution date later in the month.

"Sixty seconds," yells DeJuan Correira, Davis' 14-year-old nephew who
shares his uncle's taste for shiny blue sneakers. Troy Davis is on the
telephone, and his 15 minutes are nearly up. Kim, his younger sister,
cradles the receiver. "Well don't hang up until you have to," she
says, and then: "You be sweet."

Before the AI report, the Free Troy Davis rap songs and the YouTube
videos, in the years after Troy's conviction, there was only
whispering. "I held my head up, but my heart was burning down," said
Virginia, 63, looking away. "It was like you were fighting all by
yourself, like nobody else cared. But never have we given up." Support
from afar has helped sustain her and the family. "A lot of people all
over the world, whom we don't even know, they get the address and
write to Troy. A lot of people just sign the petition."

State Senator Regina Thomas, however, demurs from signing when she
visits the Davis family barbeque during a neighborhood walk to drum up
support for her bid -- ultimately unsuccessful -- for U.S. Congress.
She nods sympathetically when Virginia shares the disappointing news
about the latest loss in court and says, "It's very easy to convict a
person of color without hard evidence, just like with Troy." But
signing the petition would make her vulnerable to all the other causes
out there, she says. "When you start, they want you to sign
everything. I can't make it a habit." Besides, that's not her job as
legislator, she says. "I do follow up."

Savannah is a big small town where families settle and roots grow
long. Networks and family ties inevitably cross, which can prevent
some from tugging too hard at connections. Two blocks from the
Savannah River, a stout steeple rises above the First African Baptist
Church, its spare polished brass and hardwood floors built by slaves
in 1773. On a summer morning, the Rev. Thurmond Tillman delivers an
electrifying sermon to a packed congregation of burly cops, fan-waving
women and young men with long braids. After the two-hour service,
Tillman slips away from the reception and reveals that he was the one
to deliver the news of the shooting to MacPhail's wife nearly 20 years
ago.

Tillman, who also serves as a police chaplain and cuts a long,
imposing figure, says his is a proactive church intent on social
change. "We teach people not to run, to respect law enforcement, not
to be disrespectful. I'm not a proponent that we have a fair system
but, it's a system we have to live with," he says.

His associate pastor is a police lieutenant, and that proved a
difficult situation, he says, when the Davis family asked to hold a
rally at the church with civil rights firebrand the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Tillman declined so as to avoid asking a police officer to host the
event.

"It was not as if I were taking a stance against anything; that's not
what happened," he says. "I can handle myself."

Davis and his family are living on the knife edge between past and
present. Davis was born in 1968, just four years after the official
end of Jim Crow laws that banned African Americans from the charming
park squares of twisted oaks cloaked with Spanish moss that are the
pride of Savannah. Presbyterian minister Ernest Risley told Time
magazine in 1965: "I believe that integration is contrary to God's
will."

Before integration, Montgomery Street, on the far west side, was a
thriving boulevard of black-owned shops, doctors' offices and one of
the largest black-owned banks. It now houses the Ralph Mark Gilbert
Civil Rights Museum. Heru Iman, a docent at the museum, considers the
anemic local support for Davis despite the national spotlight, and
lays it out like so: "If you want to know why people have been
hesitant to speak out" -- he pauses to quote from a tome on local
history -- "keep in mind that 'lynchings were once so commonplace they
were barely spoken about.'"

A small sign for the Kress department store hangs over a downtown
storefront, the site of 1960s lunch-counter sit-ins, in a business
district that was subsequently abandoned. One generation later, a
downtown revival is in full bloom. Outside a Starbucks, former
assistant district attorney Larry Chisholm, who is African American,
maps out the local racial schism in public attitudes toward justice.

"The majority of African Americans don't see police or prosecutors as
friends. They aren't as hawkish. They are more concerned with crime
solutions and fairness," says Chisholm. "In the white community, they
are on board with long sentences for serious felonies. They are on
board with two strikes you're out. Their emphasis is not so much on
fairness." To them the system works just fine, he says. "I don't think
that's changed [since the Davis trial]."

Yet political moods do shift and resettle, creating new opportunities
and closing others for Troy Davis and his legal fight to save himself.
Time has begun to soften some hard held ideas, and it has freed others
from the grip of fear. It took years for Tonya Johnson to step
forward, to shake off her fear of reprisal and tell Davis attorneys
what she saw on the night of the murder.

Back then, Johnson, just 18, was sitting on the small porch at #1152
Yamacraw, a housing project behind the Charlie Brown pool hall, when
she heard shots go off. Johnson, now 38, says, "You breathing in the
wrong place," when asked about the case. She speaks in a hushed voice
as she strolls through Yamacraw today, her eyes darting around.

She remembers her neighbor, Sylvester "Red" Coles, one of the two
others at the crime scene with Davis, appearing at Yamacraw sweaty and
anxious. "You could tell he done something," says Johnson. He tucked
away a couple of guns in the vacant house next door, she says, and
later snatched them away.

But she kept quiet. "He put a lot of fear in me," she says. Coles, who
has consistently denied shooting MacPhail, is reportedly living in
Savannah. It wasn't until 1996 that Johnson was able to sign an
affidavit stating what she had witnessed.

It took nearly a decade for D.D. Collins, who was also at the scene of
the shooting, to recant his eyewitness testimony; he had been just 16
when police took him in for questioning without his parents present.
"I was scared as hell," he said in his 2002 statement. "They told me I
would go to jail for a long time and I would be lucky if I got out."

And it wasn't until 2000 that Dorothy Ferrell, a convicted shoplifter
who attorneys had argued provided compelling testimony against Davis,
signed an affidavit recanting. "I had four children. I couldn't go
back to jail," she said. "I felt like I didn't have any choice but to
get up there and testify."

But Davis' lawyers say he is losing a race against time. By the
mid-1990s, as Davis' lawyers prepared for his appeals in federal
court, the national political winds had shifted decidedly rightward.
Congress voted in 1996 to bring an end to "frivolous" appeals from
death row by raising the bar for new trials. They slashed funding for
state resource centers representing indigent death row inmates, and
the money for investigators to track down witnesses dried up. (Georgia
is the only death penalty state that does not provide legal counsel
for habeas corpus appeals.)

It was 2000 by the time Davis had assembled the accumulated affidavits
of witnesses recanting their testimony and began requesting a new
trial from federal courts. Prosecutors have argued he kept the
evidence in his "back pocket" until his execution date neared, and
that time made people go back on earlier statements because they don't
want to see a man die. The courts have ruled against Davis because
they say he took too much time obtaining the testimony -- a
consequence, in part, of poor legal representation.

When Davis went to trial in 1991, Georgia juries chose the death
penalty in one-half of eligible cases, according to a September 2007
investigative series published by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Yet even this state -- which has executed 42 people since the death
penalty was reinstated in 1976, the seventh highest number of
executions per state in the nation -- has begun to feel the
sociopolitical impact of shifting demographics, a change in political
mood, even the prospect of a mixed-race president. In 1993, two years
after Davis' conviction, lawmakers offered juries the option of life
without parole; they have chosen that option over death in two of
every three capital cases since 2000, according to the newspaper. DNA
evidence has helped to exonerate seven inmates, triggering debate over
the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.

Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears recently wrote, "I
believe Â… it's time to examine whether Georgia's current method of
enforcing the death penalty and its attending consequences are
compatible with the dignity, morality, and decency of society's
enlightened consciousness, and is reflective of a humane system of
justice."

Some of this change has begun to seep into Savannah, where Larry
Chisholm, the former assistant district attorney, muses over his
decision to run for D.A.: if he wins, he will be the first African
American district attorney in the city's history. Chisholm surveys the
revived downtown through wire-rimmed glasses: The arts school has
invigorated the old town with young students, and immigrants are
shaking up the old order. He sees a door open, or at least ajar, to
new ideas. The current D.A., Spencer Lawton, who has held the seat for
nearly three decades, will not seek re-election. "This is a unique
opportunity for African Americans to run for office," says Chisholm,
with a nod to the Obama effect.

Chisholm doesn't oppose the death penalty outright; politicians with
such views don't tend to get far in the South. Even so, Chisholm
proposes some interesting strategies, such as the formation of a
review committee of local leaders to weigh in before the district
attorney seeks a death sentence. In July, Chisholm carried the
Democratic primary, just days after the Georgia State Board of Pardons
and Paroles issued a stay in Davis' case until the fall. If Chisholm
wins the November contest, he could face Davis at the clemency
hearing, where he will exercise his discretion in making an argument
on the people's behalf.

Inside the prison, Davis casts his eyes toward the floor and admits he
only knows "bits and pieces" of what has happened over the last 20
years, whatever people share with him. Yet his fate has turned on the
sociopolitical ebbs and flows in Savannah and across the nation