When the State Kills

On Oct. 9, 1968, Troy Anthony Davis was brought into this world by Joseph, a veteran of the Korean War, and Virginia, a hospital worker. Last Wednesday, 42 years later, at exactly 11:08 p.m. local time, the state of Georgia killed him.

Despite the petitions for a reopening of his case, endorsed by more than a million signatures and championed by people as influential and diverse as Pope Benedict XVI, ex-President Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Desmond Tutu and rapper M1, U.S. judicial bodies and politicians ignored the pleas for clemency.

In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court postponed the execution a few hours, renewing hope for the prisoner’s thousands of supporters worldwide, who fought for his life until the last second.

But finally, at 10:53 p.m. on a night that may prove pivotal for the future of capital punishment in the United States, an employee of the Jackson prison in the southern state of Georgia injected the prisoner with a substance that killed him in 15 minutes, making him, in that moment, a new symbol of the struggle against the death penalty in the United States.

Davis, who was black, was accused of having killed Mark McPhail, a white police officer, on Aug. 18, 1989. Two years later, in a trial plagued by irregularities, he was sentenced to death. During his 20 years behind bars, he always maintained his innocence. In fact, he did so even in his last words, directed at the family of the policeman. “I’m not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother. I am innocent. The incident that happened that night is not my fault. I did not have a gun.”

And it’s probable he didn’t do it. The only thing that seems certain is that there is not enough evidence that he was the killer.

First, the gun used to shoot McPhail was never found. Second, Davis’ guilt was based primarily on the testimony of various eyewitnesses, several of which later changed their declaration of his guilt. And third, because the contradictions in the testimony of one of these witnesses, Sylvester Coles, suggest that he [Coles] could, possibly, have been the real killer.

In any case, there was more than reasonable doubt that Davis was the person who killed the 27-year-old who, when he was shot, was moonlighting as a Burger King security guard.

What type of ethics prevails?

At the least, the doubt seemed sufficient to begin a new trial. Nevertheless, nobody demanded one: not the governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal; not the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles; not even the judges of that state, first, or those of the Supreme Court, later. Nor Obama.

In a country in which 64 percent of the population supports the death penalty, and with elections just around the corner, opposing the execution of Davis was, perhaps, not the politically correct thing to do.

The attitude of the McPhail family also weighed on the outcome of the case. A few hours before the final deadline for the execution, when international pressure was great enough to possibly bring about its suspension, the wife of McPhail, Joan, supported the execution because that was “his punishment.” Anneliese, the mother of the officer, also demanded Davis’ death because that would give her “some peace.” Both were present, in the first row, during the prisoner’s final 15 minutes.

About 3,251 inmates remain on “Death Row” in the United States. If nothing and nobody stops it, it is expected that they will also be murdered — slowly and legally — in the next months. It would be fitting to ask: What type of ethics prevail in the world when the country that still runs it, the great and only superpower, sentences its criminals to a slow death, including — as in the case of Troy Davis — without certain guilt?