Murdered by the American injustice system

   
An innocent man was tortured for hours and then murdered in cold blood. That's the only way to describe the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia last night.

For over two decades, Troy endured a nightmare at the hands of police, prosecutors and the court system at every level – from his arrest during a frenzied hunt to arrest a Black man for the murder of a white Savannah, Ga., police officer; to the travesty of a trial in which he was found guilty and sentenced to death; to the years he spent pleading for one judge after another to consider the evidence that proves he's innocent.

But the American system of injustice had a final sickening twist in store for Troy.

Shortly before his scheduled execution, the US Supreme Court took up his lawyers' last-minute appeal for a stay of execution. The 7pm deadline came and went, and Georgia officials announced they would delay the execution until the justices finished their review.

Troy's family and supporters – gathered outside the prison in Georgia, and at meetings, protests and vigils around the country – celebrated what seemed to be a reprieve, until it sank in that the delay was temporary, and could end at any moment with a decision from the high court. Thousands of people who desperately wanted Troy to live spent the next three hours in agony.

Then came the decision – a one-sentence order that the Supreme Court would not grant a stay.

The state of Georgia moved ahead with its murder quickly. It happened fast because, according to reports, Troy had remained strapped to the execution gurney the entire time.

Throughout the night, Troy's supporters kept up the fight, with hundreds of people holding vigil on the grounds of the Jackson prison that houses Georgia's death row, as police dressed in riot gear looked on and helicopters flew overhead.

In Washington, D.C., protesters marched from the White House, where they had gathered to call on Barack Obama to speak out, to the Supreme Court building – the spirited protest drew hundreds. Their vigil was matched around the US and internationally – in France, Britain and Hong Kong, to name just a few countries.

In the days right before the execution, Troy's case finally received the attention it deserved. One measure was the parade of well-known figures, spanning the political spectrum from left to right, who lent their voices to Troy's cause – among them was former President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI and even former FBI Director William Sessions. A former warden in Georgia called for prison employees to be able to choose not to take part in the execution.

The day before Troy's execution date, the New York Times editorial page weighed in with an article that criticised the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles and its refusal to grant clemency: "The board's failure to commute Mr. Davis's death sentence to life without parole was a tragic miscarriage of justice."

But before this, there was a long campaign, built over many years, which organised support for Troy. That campaign gathered more than a million signatures on petitions and statements calling for Troy to be spared. Without those who pointed a spotlight on the case when the media mainly ignored it, Troy's calls for justice might have gone unnoticed.

But Troy fought for his freedom from on death row, and his supporters joined the protests on the outside. The state of Georgia did everything it could to silence Troy – officials refused to let him be interviewed or have his voice recorded – so it was up to supporters to carry that voice far and wide.

Troy's message on Wednesday to those who organised and demonstrated for him was the same as it has always been:

The struggle for justice doesn't end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me. I'm in good spirits, and I'm prayerful and at peace. But I will not stop fighting until I've taken my last breath. Georgia is prepared to snuff out the life of an innocent man.

In a sense, what happened to Troy Davis isn't a miscarriage of justice at all – because this is exactly what justice looks like in the US if you are poor or working class, and especially if you are Black. Troy always pointed out in interviews that if he was the white son of a wealthy senator, he not only wouldn't be on death row – he wouldn't have been arrested in the first place.

The physical evidence tying him to the crime certainly wasn't enough to justify his arrest – there wasn't any. Troy's conviction was based on the word of nine people, seven of whom have recanted their testimony. A former jury member at the trial came forward to say that if she knew then what she knows now, the verdict would have been not guilty.

So many of the factors in Troy's case are commonplace throughout the criminal justice system. Like the pattern of naked racism: Blacks are around 12 percent of the US population, yet they make up 41 percent of the people who sit on death row. Someone accused of killing a white person is five times more likely to be executed than someone accused of killing a Black person, according to a report from the Criminal Justice Project of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

continued

Troy Davis will be remembered for being murdered in cold blood by an evil regime. You were told by the world America and you chose to laugh in the face of all that is good and decent. Rot in hell America.

(black) life is cheap in the US.

STUDY: BLACKS WHO KILL WHITES ARE MOST LIKELY TO BE EXECUTED

Blacks convicted of killing whites are not only more likely than other killers to receive a death sentence – they are also more likely to actually be executed, a new study suggests.

But the findings showed that African Americans on death row for killing nonwhites are less likely to be executed than other condemned prisoners.

“Examining who survives on death row is important because less than 10 percent of those given the death sentence ever get executed,” said David Jacobs, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State University.

“The disparity in execution rates based on the race of victims suggests our justice system places greater value on white lives, even after sentences are handed down.”

This apparently is the first study to examine whether the race of murder victims affects the probability that a convicted killer gets the ultimate punishment, Jacobs said.

He conducted the study with Zhenchao Qian, professor of sociology at Ohio State, Jason Carmichael of McGill University and Stephanie Kent of Cleveland State University. Their results appear in the August 2007 issue of the American Sociological Review.

The study examined outcomes of 1,560 people sentenced to death in 16 states from 1973 to 2002. These 16 states were chosen because they had the complete data that the researchers needed for the study.

Other research has shown that the great majority of those sentenced to death have their sentences overturned in appeal, Jacobs said. But little is known about the factors that lead some condemned prisons to be executed.

There is more than a two-fold greater risk that an African American who killed a white person will be executed than there is for a white person who killed a non-white victim.

“The fact that blacks who kill non-whites actually are less likely to be executed than blacks who kill whites shows there is a strong racial bias here,” Jacobs said. “Blacks are most likely to pay the ultimate price when their victims are white.”

Hispanics who killed whites were also more likely to be executed than were whites who killed non-whites, the study showed. But the risk of execution were not as strong for Hispanics who killed whites as they were for blacks who killed whites.

The study also reinforced findings by Jacobs in previous studies. He found that the likelihood of a legal death penalty was greater in states with higher proportions of black residents, an ideologically more conservative population, and in states where there was greater support for Republican candidates.

In the most recent study, Jacobs finds that execution probabilities increase in states along with the population of African Americans, up to a point. But when the population of blacks reaches about 16 percent of the population, executions start to decrease. Probably at that point, African Americans have enough votes and political influence within a state to reduce the number of executions, Jacobs said.

Various other political and state-level factors also played a role in the use of the death penalty in the states studied. States with more conservative citizens were more likely to execute, as were states that had higher percentages of voters who supported Republican presidential candidates.

“Republican presidential candidates often run on law and order platforms, so it is not surprising that the success of these candidates goes along with support for the harshest punishment,” he said.

“Overall, we found that our justice system is not colorblind, even after offenders are put on death row,” Jacobs said. “White lives are still valued more than black ones when it comes to deciding who gets executed and who does not.”

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/dthrow.htm

(A recent case in New York where white jurors said they had been subtly pressured to convict a black defendant highlights something played out in America’s courts everyday – white jurors are just more likely to convict black defendants even in questionable circumstances.)

John White was probably surprised when a jury in Riverhead, New York convicted him of second-degree manslaughter after four days of deliberation. In fact, White had two good reasons to be surprised.

The first was the charge and the circumstances that got him hauled into the docket. White is a middle-aged African -American homeowner with a solid work history and no arrest record. He was charged with shooting a white teen. The teen was part of a mob of teens that allegedly assailed him and his son in front of his Long Island home. The shooting stemmed from an earlier altercation between the white teen and White’s son. The threat of attack, an angry group of white teens on his property, and no clear evidence that White was the aggressor -- in most cases that would have been enough to squash a prosecution or to garner a quick acquittal.

Obviously it wasn’t.

The second reason for surprise was how he got convicted. It took the jury four days to convict White. It’s almost always a sure sign that jurors can’t reach a verdict when jury deliberations stretch out over several days. Or, they lean heavily toward acquittal because the state’s evidence and witness testimony is muddled, conflicted or inept. That was the case in the White trial. But what White couldn’t anticipate was that the white jurors with an apparent wink and nod from the judge would badger, cajole and harass two other white jurors to convict him. That made news only because the two jurors publicly squealed about it.

What didn’t make news and is played out in America’s courts every day is the overwhelming penchant of white jurors to reflexively convict black defendants no matter how flimsy, threadbare or dubious the evidence and testimony is against them.

The tormenting pattern of white jurors blindly lapping up anything prosecutors and police say about black defendants has been well documented. In 2001, the Chicago Reporter studied dozens of cases in Cook County and found that in nearly 80 percent of the cases a black defendant was far more likely to be convicted when the jury was predominantly white. It made no difference how many times a judge told the jurors that innocence is presumed and guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Many white jurors ignored it and convicted the black defendant anyway in questionable circumstances. In mock trials and post trial interviews, jury consultants confirmed that white jurors could not shake their ingrained belief that if the defendant was black he or she just had to be guilty. They had made up their mind about the defendant’s guilt even before the first witness was called.

An exhaustive ten-year study by the Capital Jury Project on juror racial attitudes in which more than 1,000 jurors were interviewed in 14 states found that white jurors were far more willing to believe the testimony of police and prosecution witnesses than the testimony of black defendants and witnesses. Legions of other studies have also shown that white jurors are more prone to convict black than white defendants. If the defendant is black, and the victim is white, the likelihood is greater still of a conviction.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys are well aware that white jurors are much more likely to convict black defendants than are black jurors. Though it’s expressly forbidden to try to pack juries with white jurors, prosecutors have a storehouse of seemingly race-neutral legal ploys and maneuvers to do just that. And sometimes, they don’t even bother with the ploys.

The Dallas Morning News revealed in 2006 that Dallas prosecutors systematically dumped blacks from juries for years. The Supreme Court tossed the conviction of Texas death row inmate Thomas Miller-El based on a Dallas prosecutor's brazen racial jury sanitizing. Yet prosecutors still try to get as many whites, and as few blacks as possible, on juries. The thinking is that whites are more pro-prosecution than blacks. They aren't totally wrong.

The crude but more often subtle massage of juries by prosecutors to nail black defendants wreaks havoc with defense attorneys. They well know that they must wage a furious battle to combat often dubious witnesses and evidence against their clients. They know that they have to wage an even more furious battle to combat the racial stereotypes and negative mindsets that many white jurors bring to the courtroom. Some defense attorneys flatly told researchers after the Chicago Reporter study came out that they would much rather defend a white defendant. Then they only have to battle against prosecutors, and not the sneaky and overt racial attitudes of many white jurors.

White is lucky in one sense. The shooting victim lived, and White was and still is out on bail. With the new revelation of possible juror misconduct, his chances of getting his conviction overturned on appeal are pretty good. Countless other black defendants tried and convicted by all or mostly white juries, no matter how questionable the evidence and testimony against them, won’t.

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=30578534f7bf5ca26cc6e195be13f310

This is bad.

worse was when they revived a guy on death row, against his wishes, just so they could execute him later.

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The only possible explanation for this is racism.  It can't be anything to do with the fact that blacks commit exponentially more violent crimes than other races.

http://www.amren.com/ar/1999/07/index.html

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Shocking that blacks let their fellow blacks off the hook so often.  Anyone remmeber when the Oj simpson verdict was released - blacks openly celebrating that he 'got away with it'?  Just lucky that whites generally have more integrity than that.

Life_goes_on wrote on Sep 23^rd, 2011 at 10:02pm:




The opening paragraph ONLY was the opening statement.

Even if he is innocent of killing the cop (which he isn't) he also shot another man in the face, and pistol whipped another on that same night.  Yep, he's a real great guy.  A real winner.

As for your 'recanting' angle - the defence already claimed their words were not worth a penny seeing as how they were, in their own words -

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So their testimony given under oath "cannot be believed", but their recantation, done under no duress or threat of any sort of penalty simply must be the truth?  

Okay mate.  Whatever.  If you don't agree with the death penalty fullstop, that's fine, I don't either - but let's not pretend this was an innocent man - he's guilty as sin, that much is clear.  Whether he deserved to die for his sins is the only grey area, and according to the law in his area, whether it be right or wrong, he was executed for it.