The Execution of Troy Davis

By Eileen Servidio, Ph.D., President of the School of International Relations at AGS

Posted on September 28th, 2011

I received a phone call two days before the execution of Troy Davis from a journalist. Her question was simply « Can I say this execution is based on racism ? »

I truly had no idea. I sent her to the Death Penalty Information Center to get the statistics.

New phone call, same journalist : « More whites have been executed than blacks since 1976 ». She seemed to regret this fact very much.

It is true though; 56% of the executions were of whites and only 35% were blacks. However, if one puts that into perspective with the percentage of blacks in the USA, one can conclude that actually a black person has more of a chance to receive the death penalty than a white person.

Even more interesting are the statistics given by the Death Penalty Information Center that demonstrate that over 75% of the victims in cases resulting in an execution are white. However, nationally only an estimated 50% of murder victims are white.

Thirty-four States in the United States have capital punishment (as does the federal criminal system and the U.S. military). The number has decreased. Actually the number of executions has also decreased, and that for several reasons. One of the reasons concerns more the cost of executions than the inhumanity of the punishment. For example, a study estimated that the death penalty cost New Jersey $256 million between 1983 and 2005. Which is a strong argument for eliminating capital punishment in some States.

On a more humanitarian level, the United States Supreme Court has decided that capital punishment will be considered in violation of the « cruel and unusual clause » of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in certain cases. In Atkins v. Virginia (2002), the Supreme Court held that the execution of mentally retarded persons is in violation of the 8th Amendment. According to the Court, « if the culpability of the average murderer is insufficient to justify the most extreme sanction available to the State, the lesser culpability of the mentally retarded offender surely does not merit that form of retribution ». Put simply, due to the person’s « reduced capacity » the mentally retarded person is less « guilty » than someone who has all their mental faculties.

This same type of reasoning was used by the Court in the 2005 Roper v. Simmons case. The Court decided that the death penalty was not an option for offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crime was committed. Again the Court considered such an execution as a violation of the cruel and unusual clause due to the fact that juvenile’s « irresponsible conduct is not as morally reprehensible as that of an adult », that they are more vulnerable and have less control over their immediate surrounding and finally that they are struggling to find their own identity and thus even though they have committed the most serious of crimes, they may be retrievable.

Back to the journalist’s question. Was Troy Davis executed because he was black. I do not know the answer. I know what I suspect without any real proof of what went on in the minds of the juries, judges, appeal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court.

I do know that Mr. Davis proclaimed his innocence to the very last minute. I do know that around 138 persons (from 1973 to 2010, Death Penalty Information Center site) have been released being considered innocent thanks to more modern techniques of proof; persons who were originally convicted and sentenced to death. I do believe that in reality this number of errors is likely to be much higher. I am sure that a poor person cannot be assured of being properly represented by a competent lawyer who has experience in capital cases.

And I do know that the American Bar Association launched a death penalty moratorium project in 2001 considering that the administration of the death penalty, “far from being fair and consistent, is instead a haphazard maze of unfair practices with no internal consistency”. The Association felt the necessity of taking a hard look “at the growing evidence showing that race, geography, wealth, and even personal politics can be factors at every stage of a capital case-from arrest to sentencing”. The Association also insisted on the fact that many of the persons on death row “have not received the quality of legal representation that the severity and the finality of a death sentence demand”.

It seems evident that the U.S. justice system, or any justice system for that matter, cannot avoid prejudices or simple mistakes.

If the fact of killing a person—for whatever reason—does not seem wrong on a moral level, then perhaps the possibility or should one say, the probability of innocent persons being executed should make at least some of us cringe in shame.

Will we regret one day the execution of Troy Davis after having found out that he did not “personally kill” the victim as he proclaimed on the day of his execution? I, personally, regret his execution immensely already.