The Angry Exile: Troy Davis

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Friday, 23 September 2011

Troy Davis

Beyond reasonable doubt? Really? No DNA, no blood, no murder weapon, no ballistics, in fact no physical evidence of any kind beyond cartridges and fired bullets of the same calibre as a handgun Davis admitted having on him earlier that day, and .38 is a very widely used calibre - literally millions of .38 guns exist. And of the nine eyewitnesses seven have signed affidavits recanting their testimonies, among claims that some were pressured into their statements by police and that others were illiterate and didn't know what they were signing. The eighth eyewitness simply refuses to speak, and the last, the one who stands by what he told the court, is felt by some (Davis' defence team, for instance) to have been the real killer all along. In fact nine people have come forward with evidence implicating this man. If so it would not be the first time in the US that someone has ended up on Death Row for a murder they didn't commit, all thanks to the eyewitness testimony of those were actually guilty of the crime.

Spencer Lawton, the retired prosecutor in the case, told CNN: “There is the legal case, the case in court, and the public relations case. We have consistently won the case as it has been presented in court. We have consistently lost the case as it has been presented in the public realm, on TV and elsewhere."

Maybe that's because with no physical evidence and questionably eyewitness testimony many people can't figure out why you've won in court. In the original trial when you had all those eyewitnesses, fair enough, but there's a huge question mark over that evidence now. There's no statute of limitations on murder, yet Davis' team was told it was too late to consider these things now. It's too late to take a polygraph test as well. At the same time he's told that he can't have a retrial 'on the grounds that he had failed to "prove his innocence"'. Well, hey, of course he's failed to prove his innocence, of course the prosecution won in court. You'll always fail to prove your innocence and the prosecution will always win if courts simply decide not to look at contradictory evidence.

What worries me is that even a prison sentence is supposed to be handed down only when the case is proven beyond reasonable doubt - better that ten guilty men go free than an innocent is deprived of liberty, and all that - and surely even more so if a death sentence is on the cards. In Troy Davis' case is there enough to be sure beyond reasonable doubt that he should have been in prison, much less put to death?

The answer is necessarily subjective. Those involved in the prosecution think so, but they are advocates for an adversarial legal system and I'd be disappointed if they didn't. It's their job. The MacPhails, the family of the off duty officer who was murdered think so, but twenty years ago they were promised closure and it's been a long wait - I can't honestly say for sure that in the same position I'd want to believe anything else myself. But objectively it seems as if there is effectively no reliable evidence anymore, and even at the point where he'd have been certain that he was about to be killed anyway and owning up to the murder couldn't do him any more harm, Troy Davis maintained his innocence. Maybe he was lying to the very end, maybe not - who really knows? And that's kind of the point.

Oh well, men have hanged with less against them than that.

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Gary K. · 704 weeks ago

Unless members of the public are going to personally review trial transcripts in every death penalty case, they have no way of knowing the truth. The media certainly won’t tell them.

It’s nearly impossible to receive a death sentence these days — unless you do something completely crazy like shoot a cop in full view of dozens of witnesses in a Burger King parking lot.

That’s what Troy Davis? did in August 1989. Davis is the media’s current baby seal of death row.

1 reply · active 704 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 704 weeks ago

Generally I prefer not to second guess courts and I'm well aware of the pitfalls of listening to the media. There is a reason I have a tag for 'Journalistic crap' and don't have one for 'judicial fuckups', even though I've blogged on judicial fuckups from time to time.

However, in this instance the question is of guilt proven beyond reasonable doubt. Personally I'm an abolitionist for other reasons (in short I don't trust governments not to abuse the power and waste a few people they'd rather not have around - they abuse so many other powers anyway so what's to stop them) but I've done that to death elsewhere, no pun intended. All I wanted to look at here was the question of reasonable doubt, and if he'd been sentenced to life or any other sentence the question would still be a valid one. If half of what has been reported is accurate then I'd have reasonable doubt - the lack of physical evidence alone is worrying.

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Gary K. · 704 weeks ago

After a two-week trial with 34 witnesses for the state and six witnesses for the defense, the jury of seven blacks and five whites took less than two hours to convict Davis of Officer Mark MacPhail’s murder, as well as various other crimes. Two days later, the jury sentenced Davis to death.

It’s true that the bulk of the evidence against Davis was eyewitness testimony. That tends to happen when you shoot someone in a busy Burger King parking lot.

Eyewitness testimony, like all evidence tending to show guilt, has gotten a bad name recently, but the “eyewitness” testimony in this case did not consist simply of strangers trying to distinguish one tall black man from another. For one thing, several of the eyewitnesses knew Davis personally.

1 reply · active 704 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 704 weeks ago

There's a reason eyewitness testimony has gotten a bad name - it's bloody unreliable. This is inherent and doesn't become less so just because the witness knows someone. Leaving aside the possibility of grudges and scores to settle (which one party might not even be aware of) that a motive for a witness to perjure themselves, have you ever seen someone you knew and on the point of saying 'hi', or even afterwards, realised that actually it's someone else. Or the other way round and someone you've never met think you were someone else? People do this all the time, and it only takes one or two convincing people to say 'Yeah, I saw who left that comment. I know the bloke. It was Gary K.' for other people who know Gary K as well to think, 'Well, it looked like him and Angry got a better look so it must have been.' Not saying this is what happened - I am seeing this kind of thing can happen. People are fallible and it's become more widely recognised, which is why physical evidence trumps it and DNA evidence is the gold standard. And human error can even bugger that up and convict the wrong person on rare occasions.

Incidentally, I'm not saying eyewitness testimony has no purpose. Cops must love it since it gives them a name to focus their investigation on, and certainly it's got evidentiary value and must be nice to have to back up physical evidence. Taking the place of physical evidence? That's something else.

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Gary K. · 704 weeks ago

The bulk of the eyewitness testimony established the following:

Two tall, young black men were harassing a vagrant in the Burger King parking lot, one in a yellow shirt and the other in a white Batman shirt. The one in the white shirt used a brown revolver to pistol-whip the vagrant. When a cop yelled at them to stop, the man in the white shirt ran, then wheeled around and shot the cop, walked over to his body and shot him again, smiling.

Now the media claim that seven of the nine witnesses against Davis at trial have recanted.

First of all, the state presented 34 witnesses against Davis — not nine — which should give you some idea of how punctilious the media are about their facts in death penalty cases.

1 reply · active 704 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 704 weeks ago

Nine eyewitnesses, 25 other witnesses for a total of thirty four. In almost all trial most witnesses give evidence which is only a part of the whole. For example, the ME would be a witness, yes? But certainly not an eyewitness. The ME would give evidence - cause of death, extent of injuries, etc - but which in isolation doesn't point at any particular person. Similarly you'd have got responding officers, people who saw Davis before and afterwards. In other words lots of people who have one or two pieces of the jigsaw, as it were, but who did not see the picture on the lid of the box. Of the ones who did say they saw the picture seven have recanted and since other people have since pointed the finger at one more that leaves a question mark hanging over nearly 90% of that testimony.

The media, who I don't hesitate to bag when they deserve it (which is fairly often) have largely distinguished between vanilla witnesses and the nine key witnesses, without whose testimony a conviction seems rather unlikely given the lack of physical evidence. Personally if I was on a jury, especially if it were a capital case, I'd be extremely reluctant to convict without physical evidence since it's not that hard to get a few people to line up and say the same thing. I've been a prosecution witness and felt the pressure to help justice 'be done'.

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Gary K. · 704 weeks ago

Among the witnesses who did not recant a word of their testimony against Davis were three members of the Air Force, who saw the shooting from their van in the Burger King drive-in lane. The airman who saw events clearly enough to positively identify Davis as the shooter explained on cross-examination, “You don’t forget someone that stands over and shoots someone.”

Only two of the seven alleged “recantations” (out of 34 witnesses) actually recanted anything of value — and those two affidavits were discounted by the court because Davis refused to allow the affiants to testify at the post-trial evidentiary hearing, even though one was seated right outside the courtroom, waiting to appear.

1 reply · active 704 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 704 weeks ago

Okay, so of the three Air Force personnel only one is an eyewitness. The other two would be... okay, well, kind of eyewitnesses but since they didn't see clearly enough to make an identification that's probably generous. They witnessed a shooting, could give evidence as to time, number of shots fired, etc. They could not say who did it. The one who was able to is presumably the one of those important nine who has neither recanted nor spoken of it again since.

That only two out of the seven recantations was considered of value seems at first sight something of a contradiction. If valueless then why was their testimony at trial not also valueless? Conversely if their evidence was sufficiently important for them to be considered key witnesses their what makes the recanting of that evidence irrelevant? I'll have a google later if I get a chance (other things on my plate) to find out more, and also about the two whose affidavits were disallowed.

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Gary K. · 704 weeks ago

The court specifically warned Davis that his refusal to call his only two genuinely recanting witnesses would make their affidavits worthless. But Davis still refused to call them — suggesting, as the court said, that their lawyer-drafted affidavits would not have held up under cross-examination.

With death penalty opponents so fixated on Davis’ race — he’s black — it ought to be noted that all the above witnesses are themselves African-American. The first man Davis shot in the car that night was African-American.

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There’s a reason more than a dozen courts have looked at Davis’ case and refused to overturn his death sentence. He is as innocent as every other executed man since at least 1950, which is to say, guilty as hell

1 reply · active 704 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 704 weeks ago

Ah, identity politics rearing its ugly head again. For what it's worth I think death penalty opponents are mistaken to focus on the race of condemned prisoners. It might be something for people campaigning on wider issues but once someone's on death row who gives a rip what colour their skin is? Alan Gell was white when he was sentenced to death, and he was still white when a court finally found that he'd been wrongly convicted, that he had an excellent alibi in that he was in prison at the time of the murder, and that he'd been convicted on the strength of eyewitness evidence (no physical evidence as far as I can tell) given by the people who'd actually killed the victim. I fell they'd be better off focusing on how often things get stuffed up, though as I've mentioned my opposition is based more on distrust of the state and a feeling that a rope around one man's neck is the threat of a rope around the necks of all.

Incidentally, the two eyewitnesses against Gell had already accepted a plea-bargain of ten years for second degree murder in exchange for testimony against him. Despite the fact that it's now known they lied and implicated an innocent man (might be the wrong word - Gell is a criminal, just not a killer) to hide their guilt they do not appear to be on death row in North Carolina. I'd call that a lose-lose.

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Gary K. · 704 weeks ago

The previous posts are taken from the writings of Ann Coulter who is a Conservative American writer.

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jimfryar 34p · 704 weeks ago

One of the most disturbing aspects of the US justice system is the length prosecutors will go to in order to prevent successful cases from being overturned on new evidence later. It seems inconceivable that exculpatory evidence could be prevented of being heard, just to prevent the prosecution being overturned.

What sort of creep would allow a man to be executed in order to avoid being proven wrong?

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