Controversial Execution Evokes International Condemnation

At 11:08 local time last night, Troy Davis was pronounced dead. After an unusually long deliberation, which delayed the execution by more than four hours, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a statement that rejected the petition to suspend the execution. In a prison in Jackson, Ga., the 42-year-old African-American, who had been imprisoned for over 20 years, was executed by lethal injection after having been convicted of murdering police officer Mark MacPhail.

Due to the existence of serious doubts surrounding the crime, the case caused a polemic divide and became one of the most controversial cases in the United States. Not even pleas from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter or Pope Benedict XVI stopped Davis’ execution. On Thursday, the international community reacted.

“We strongly deplore the fact that the numerous appeals for clemency were not heeded,” the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement. France also stressed its opposition to the death penalty “anywhere, whatever the circumstances.”

Amnesty International, which organized a large-scale global campaign against the execution, considers it to be a “huge setback for human rights in the USA, where a man who has been condemned under dubious evidence is to be executed by the state,” according to Salil Shetty, secretary general of the organization. The director of Amnesty International, Larry Cox, confirmed that in his 30 years of work to abolish the death penalty, he has never seen such a dubious sentencing.

Mistrust and Prejudice

Davis’ case was presented by the defense as a typical black citizen wrongly convicted for the death of a white person, and it reopened the debate concerning the application of the death penalty in the U.S. Davis learned of his sentence in 1991, two years after the murder of MacPhail in Savannah, Ga.

During the time of the crime, nine eyewitnesses accused Davis of being the gunman, yet the weapon was never found. Fingerprints or other traces of DNA were never detected. In the process, seven witnesses recanted and changed their testimony, and some even stated that they were forced by the police to finger Davis.

The execution of the accused had already been postponed three times. In 2008, the Supreme Court issued a temporary suspension of the penalty and ordered a hearing during the following year. In the meantime, a federal judge determined that Davis could not prove his innocence.

Since the reintroduction of the death penalty in the U.S. in 1976, the State of Georgia has carried out 51 executions, with only seven being granted pardons. Davis was the 35th person to be executed in the country this year. Of the 50 states in the country, 34 allow the death penalty.