Guilty or Innocent? Dead!

If Troy Davis was innocent, the time he served in prison is already a scandal. If he was guilty, the death sentence is still an outrageous injustice.

This won’t be about the pope’s visit to Germany. There has to be a pope-free zone somewhere. This is a complaint about the polar opposite to the pope, about the ungodly zone around Jackson, Georgia, USA, on Wednesday evening. That’s when Troy Davis was executed with a lethal injection after spending 20 years on death row, constantly maintaining his innocence. Davis was convicted of shooting police officer Mark Allen MacPhail to death in 1989. The execution caused great indignation worldwide. There had been numerous pleas for clemency, among them from Germany’s current visitor from the Vatican. They all fell on deaf ears. The indignation is all the greater because it is probable that Troy Davis was not guilty.

Prior to his conviction, nine eyewitnesses had identified him as the shooter. Seven of them have since recanted and said that they had been pressured by police to make a positive identification; one of the witnesses suffers from severe mental illness and the ninth had himself been a suspect in the shooting. The murder weapon was never found, nor did any DNA evidence or fingerprints linking Davis to the crime. Nevertheless, Troy Davis, 42 years of age, was put to death at 11:08 p.m. local time. But does it matter whether Troy Davis was really guilty? Would the execution have been just a bit less ungodly if it had been carried out on a guilty person?

“Thou shalt not kill,” says the fifth of God’s commandments, a God in whom all Christians believe. Christians in America, in particular, believe in God most vehemently. Even if someone has done evil, don’t we want to be just a little better instead of committing a similar evil deed that puts us on the same plane with the murderer? Now that we rebuke the Islamic theocracies for their inhumane acts, while no reference is made to similar acts in America, the question is again begged: Don’t we want to be a little better and rise above such acts? If Troy Davis was innocent, then it’s an outrageous scandal that he spent 20 years in prison for something he didn’t do. If Troy Davis really was guilty, if he did shoot Mark Allen MacPhail in August 1989, then it was right that he spent 20 years in jail for his crime. But it’s more than a scandal — it’s a scandalous injustice and a despicable crime to kill him. And for Christians, it is also a mortal sin.