Justice Served?

Troy Davis’s fate was sealed Monday by the Georgia Board of Paroles and Pardons. He was executed Wednesday night by lethal injection. For those of you who don’t follow national news closely, I’ll rewind and give you the background story.

In 1991, Troy Davis was convicted of shooting and killing police officer Mark McPhail. At the time, there were nine eyewitnesses who testified to seeing Davis commit the crime. There was no physical evidence tying him to the scene of the crime, and the murder weapon was never found.

Fast-forward several years and many appeals later, and suddenly we have a slightly different situation. Seven of those nine witnesses who testified against Davis have since recanted their testimony.

Several of those witnesses then proceeded to submit sworn affidavits in which they admitted that they “were pressured or coerced by police into testifying or signing (the original) statements against Troy Davis.”

Oh, and did I mention? Troy Davis is a black man in the Georgia justice system. One of the two other witnesses who has not recanted his original testimony against Davis is Sylvester Coles. In what shouldn’t really come as a shock, Coles happens to be the principle alternative suspect in the crime.

What should come as a shock, given the Board’s decision, is that there have been nine individuals who have signed affidavits implicating Coles in the crime. Despite the apparent evidence against Davis’s conviction, the officer’s family has continued to push for Davis’s execution.

I think I should make it a point to say at this juncture that I have never lost a family member to violent crime, and I hope I never will. There is no way that I can possibly understand what it must be like to have your father, your husband or your son torn from you in such an awful way.

The desire to see justice served is understandable, but putting a man to death when there is so much room for doubt hardly seems like the justice that Officer McPhail would have wanted. In fact, it hardly seems like justice at all.

Maybe Troy Davis did commit the crime, but there are now as many people testifying against Coles as there were originally against Davis. If that wasn’t enough to free the man, I would have hoped that it would have been enough to at least prevent him from being executed. Neither are options for Davis anymore.

And therein lies the biggest problem with the death penalty. There are no do-overs, mulligans or second chances. If the justice system makes a mistake, an innocent human being will have lost their life.

But perhaps the death penalty enthusiasts we all heard announce themselves so viscerally in the recent presidential debate would have a different suggestion.

Maybe we should kill Coles, too, just to be sure we got the right one. Then we’ll know without a doubt that we have avenged the death of an innocent man.

Now there’s justice.
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— jontodd@indiana.edu