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Troy Davis will be executed tonight for a crime he most likely didn't commit. Davis was implicated in the murder of police officer Martin McPhail in Georgia. Since Davis' conviction, 7 out of the 9 witnesses in the case recanted. Two witnesses confessed to fabricating their accounts, three of the four who testified at trial have signed affadavits recanting, and others have implicated the ninth witness, a Sylvester "Red" Coles, as the real gunman. The reason witness testimony is so important in this case is that there is no physical evidence and no murder weapon: Davis was convicted entirely by witness testimony, which is what makes this account from one of the witnesses simply chilling:
One witness, Antoine Williams, a Burger King employee who identified Davis as the gunman at the trial, later said: "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."As is this one:
"I told them it was Red and not Troy who was messing with that man, but they didn't want to hear that," Collins, who was 16 at the time, said in his 2002 statement. "The detectives told me, 'Fine, have it your way. Kiss your life goodbye because you're going to jail.' 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."Despite the massive amount of exculpatory evidence and high profiles of Davis supporters (they include Pope Benedict XVI and former President Jimmy Carter) Davis' case faced several serious roadblocks. The first was legislation signed by Bill Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing that limits the reasons for which death penalty convictions can be overturned. The second was simply that McPhail was a police officer who left behind a family; there is a tremendous desire to see someone, anyone, punished for McPhail's murder, and it doesn't really seem to matter if the person punished is actually guilty.
This is the logical extension of holding "black people" accountable for urban crime, rather than the individuals themselves. In this scheme of thought, as long as a black man pays for the crime--any one will do. This is, quite plainly, a lynching, of the decidedly more fatal low-tech variety.
--A. Serwer
