Troy Davis is yet another victim of a broken system

Troy Davis was convicted and sentenced to death before many students at Georgetown today were born. His fate has been sealed our entire lives. On September 21, 2011, yet another American man was killed for a crime he did not commit.

Having spent most of his adult life on death row, Davis had to spend his last day in an agonizing battle. First the world heard that the President would not intervene. Then, the Supreme Court deliberated for hours over a stay of execution, which he had successfully received three times before. But he was denied a fourth. From his fatal injection at 10:53 p.m. to death at 11:08 p.m., Troy Davis passed away and became a pallid shadow cast long and low over the United States.

This Tuesday night, in Copley Formal Lounge, Troy’s sister Kimberly described her brother. She described his faith, his love for his niece and nephew, and what he had done for her as she soldiered through a debilitating paralysis caused by multiple sclerosis. She lovingly recalled how he would calmly tell her that “‘can’t’ is not a word in your vocabulary.”

From her words it was sharply clear that his voice challenged her to fight her condition. To Troy, Kimberly could play basketball again. To Troy, Kimberly had to walk again, and so one afternoon on the driveway he simply asked her to get up, which she did, and pulled the wheelchair away. Terrified, she complained, but he warmly insisted she must succeed. She did. This small glimpse into the life of the Davis family revealed how normal they were, how bravely they fought life’s injustices, and how strong they could be together.

These qualities took them on three-hour journeys to and from the prison. Troy would plead with them to make the onerous drive less frequently, but his mother and sisters would have none of it. His sister Martina’s children loved seeing their uncle, even through plexiglass and iron mesh. His young niece would put her hand up to the screen and he would reach out. Contact visits were banned three years ago, which meant he could no longer hug his mother. All he had left was the sight of his family and prayer. His mother said a family that prays together stays together, and so Troy led prayers when they visited.

Davis’ death casts a pall over the American criminal justice system. It is not simply the question of whether justice is done or not. It isn’t even about fair trials and the definition of “peer” when selecting a jury. Here a more intrinsic wrong was committed, one which we cannot debate with style and panache.

The issue here is about the taking of life at all. Execution is absurd. The possibility of executing the wrong man isn’t the point at hand. Innocence is not in question because to truly support abolition of the death penalty one must accept commutation of all death sentences, including those for despicable crimes like the horrific killing of James Byrd. That killing, ten years after the murder Davis was accused of, was a racist, sadistic, and macabre killing of a man simply because of the colour of his skin. But Lawrence Brewer, Shawn Berry, and John William King do not deserve death sentences either. No one does.

It isn’t appropriate for any human to kill another. It is an act woefully ignorant of the potential that each and every human life holds. To love like Troy did, to take care of one’s family, is commendable and makes his murder by the state of Georgia all the more sorrowful. It does not however make one iota of difference whether or not he should have lived.

That is determined solely by what Lawrence Hayes told students on Tuesday: “The Constitution says:  ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life’—I think I can stop there. Life.” It is indeed an unalienable right, and it is decreed in the first legal document of this country. If these revolutionary words won’t suffice in establishing the sanctity of life, what will?