On September 21, Troy Davis was executed at a Georgia state prison after 20 years on death row.
His case received minimal press attention for two decades until the week before his execution date, when an impassioned effort to save his life began across the world. The use of the death penalty in a case with “too much doubt,” as Davis’s supporters chanted outside the prison, sparked outrage as petitioners critiqued Georgia’s insouciant decision to kill a man who was never proven irrefutably guilty.
While many have rightfully claimed that an answer to injustice in criminal cases like Davis’s is the elimination of the death penalty, the case also stands as a reflection of the many cracks in our flawed judicial system.
Injustice for Davis began in 1991, when he was convicted of killing Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer, despite the lack of physical evidence directly connecting him to the murder. It continued in 2009, when the Supreme Court ordered the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia to hold an evidentiary hearing, where the majority of the testimonies that had identified Davis as the killer was recanted.
Though some of the new testimonies implicated the same man that Davis had always maintained was the actual killer, the judge decided not to consider them in his ruling. In several of the affidavits, witnesses suggested that they had been coerced through fear into signing statements that said Davis had confessed to the crime. At the time of his execution, the only legitimate physical evidence presented by the prosecution team was from a shooting incident Davis had been involved in earlier; the inadequate argument was that because the bullets were similar in both cases, Davis must have been MacPhail’s shooter as well.
On September 21, a final injustice was served to Davis as the Supreme Court delayed his execution for four tense hours of deliberation before finally allowing Georgia to execute him. By 11:08 p.m., the time of his death, it seemed clearer than ever that capital punishment had been unfairly and cruelly delivered in a case that clearly left room for speculation on its defendant’s guilt. Davis’s execution stands as evidence of the pitfalls of America’s use of the death penalty.
Though it would be a major step in the direction of justice, eliminating the death penalty will not entirely fix the criminal justice system. Reforming the system to reach more just outcomes requires a continual effort on many fronts, not just in the struggle against the death penalty. As we’ve seen with Davis’s case, if we wait until another crisis of faith in our system before we try to change it, it will probably be too late.
