[Ppnews] My Visit With Troy Davis, a Man Facing Death on October 27th

[Political Prisoner News]

My Visit With Troy Davis, a Man Facing Death on October 27th




By Federica Valla, American Observer
Posted on October 23, 2008, Printed on October 23, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/104293/

October 23rd is a Global Day of Action for Troy 
Davis. 
<http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/troy-davis-finality-over-fairness/page.do?id=1011343>here 
for more information.

They come out of the corridor all dressed up, 
with perfectly ironed white suits with blue 
collars and tennis shoes, a white smile upon 
their shaved faces. It is visiting day, and they 
have been waiting for it since last week.

They lean in a line against the yellow painted 
gates with their arms straight out, waiting for 
the warden to release their handcuffs, and then 
they dissolve in the crowded room filled with 
kids and antsy wives who offer them prepackaged 
foods just purchased from the vending machines in 
the hall -- their gourmet lunch for the day.

But Troy Davis is not allowed in the visitation 
room with the rest of them because he is a death 
row inmate. Visitors see him in a separate room, 
two gates away from where others greet guests.

Inside the prison, he is known by the number 
657378, since the day he was confined to cell 79 
on the top floor of the G-house in the Georgia 
Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, 
Ga. He was convicted for the murder of a police 
officer when he was 20 years old. He has always said he is innocent.

Davis has been sitting on Georgia's death row for 
17 years, charged with the assault of Larry 
Young, a homeless man, and the murder of police 
officer Mark Allen MacPhail in the parking lot of 
a Burger King in Savannah, Ga. on August 19, 
1989. Seven of the nine eyewitnesses who 
testified that Davis was present at the shooting 
have recanted their testimony, saying police 
pressured them into making false statements. 
Their recantations have never been heard in 
court. No weapon has ever been found, and no 
physical evidence connects Davis to the crime.

After years of litigation, Davis exhausted his 
appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court in March 
2008 when the court denied him an evidentiary 
hearing. He was denied clemency from the Georgia 
Pardons and Paroles Board on Sept. 8, 2008. His 
appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was not 
considered until Sept. 23, when the court 
convened an emergency session and gave Davis a 
stay less than two hours before his scheduled 
execution, due to the abundance of incongruent 
evidence in favor of his innocence.

The stay gave Davis and his many supporters new 
hope. But on Oct. 14, the U.S. Supreme Court 
declined to give Davis's case a full hearing, 
leaving the lower court verdict intact. A new 
death warrant was issued few days later and a 
third execution date is scheduled for Oct. 27 at 7pm.

I met Davis inside the walls of the prison for 
the first time, when, after a two-month 
correspondence, I decided to fly to Jackson to 
talk to him in person. I wanted to know for 
myself how someone could sleep at night, knowing 
that death might soon be whispering in his ears 
for a crime he says he did not commit.

The answer was more powerful than I had expected.

"My faith has taught me that if you give all your 
worries to God he will carry your burdens," Davis 
wrote in a letter to me sent the day after my 
visit. "It's God that carried me through death's 
valley and took my worries away."

For Davis, faith is the door to freedom. Having 
faith makes you stronger than your family and 
able to support them more than they are 
supporting you, he said, because they are the 
ones who will be left behind once you are gone 
and you have to show them you are not afraid to die.

"Sometimes all of this seems like it's happening 
to someone else. I sometimes dream to be free, 
but in each dream my family is 18-and-a-half 
years younger, and my father is still alive," 
said Davis during an in-person interview in April 
2008. "I am disappointed at the system, but 
refuse to become bitter and angry, because I 
still have a lot of fight left in me 
 I have too 
much to live for to give up, to give up on myself 
means I have given up on my family as well, but 
we are in this together and I cannot give up now."

Meeting Davis not only changed the person I am 
today, it changed the way I perceived death, and 
prison, and the smell of prepackaged food.

Walking though the prison's metal gates in the 
early hours of that April day, I felt sick to my 
stomach. Standing in line with mothers, daughters 
and wives of inmates, I felt out of place and 
inappropriate. I had not lost anyone dear to the 
prison's walls; I was just a cocky journalist in 
search of a scoop. But my feeling of regret soon 
vanished once I saw the smile on Davis's face, 
and perceived how much my interest in his case changed his day.

I was not allowed to bring a recorder in to my 
interview with Davis. I wasn't even allowed pen 
and paper. Eight hours after I sat down with him, 
my head filled with interesting thoughts and 
minus $10 in prepackaged food later, I left his 
cell to pour my thoughts on paper.

Six months have passed since that day. I've tried 
to start writing this article ten times, trying 
different structures and voices and perspectives. 
I'm finally ready to explore my chat with Davis 
that foggy afternoon of late April.

Why now? Because much has changed since that 
weekend when I talked to him in person. I think 
it is time for others to know what I found in 
that cell that so captured my attention, 
especially now that Davis is facing his third and 
final execution date on Oct 27.

Before prison, Davis was a big brother to his 
siblings. He took night classes to get his high 
school diploma so he would have time to take care 
of his younger sister Kimberly when she became 
paralyzed. He would drop her off and pick her up 
from school since their parents were separated, 
their oldest sister Martina was in the army, and 
their mom worked the day shift, he said. After he 
graduated from high school, Davis worked in his 
father's construction company. Every week, he 
took $50 from his paycheck and snuck the cash 
into his mother's room to help her pay the bills, he said.

It never crossed his mind that hanging out with 
the wrong people on a summer night in 1989 could 
have cost him his life as a free man, or that an 
innocent man -- which he insists he is -- could 
be slated to die under the American justice system.

"For an innocent man like me the justice system 
continues to fail me. Why is that so hard to 
admit they made a mistake? What kind of person 
knows he coerced false evidence to convict an 
innocent man and still refuses to right the 
wrong? Who is more barbaric then, them or the 
people they put in prison?" he asked in a letter 
dated April 27. "I would like to ask society how 
long would you remain quiet while innocent people 
suffer, while we remain on death row and unjustly 
get convicted? When is it that enough is enough? 
When will you speak up and fight to stop 
injustice everywhere? Or will you wait until 
someone you love becomes a victim to the system, too?"

***

It is no surprise that a man facing death would 
say he is innocent of the crime. But Davis is not 
alone in claiming his innocence.

While investigating Davis's story, I came across 
a similar case: the case of Rubin Cantu, a 
22-year-old Hispanic man who was executed in 
Texas in 1993. As in Davis's case, Cantu was 
convicted based solely on eyewitness 
identification. He was found to be innocent -- 
after he was killed. Among the documents on file 
in Davis's case was a letter from Samuel D. 
Millsap Jr., a former Texas District Attorney and 
the prosecutor in Cantu's case. In the letter, 
Millsap said he has concerns about having 
convicted Rubin Cantu for a crime he might not 
have committed solely on the basis of one eyewitness's testimony.

Millsap said he thinks Troy Davis's case is similar to Cantu's.

"In the Davis case now, the question is if we are 
about to execute a man in circumstances in which 
it is likely or, at least, there is a substantial 
chance that he did not commit the crime that he 
was convicted for," he said. "It seems to me that 
what courts have an obligation to do is try to 
make sure that justice is done and that the 
innocents are protected. Personally, what the 
Georgia Court has done by refusing to grant Troy 
Davis a hearing is really the ultimate in form over substance."

Millsap believes in Davis's innocence. In 2007, 
he wrote a letter to the Pardons and Paroles 
Board advocating clemency for Davis. Amnesty 
International has also been active in Davis's 
case, publishing a detailed report on his trial's 
flaws and organizing weekly rallies in Atlanta.

***

"Being on death watch is something unimaginable. 
I did not realize the seriousness of it until it 
was all over," Davis said when we talked in 
prison in April. "Imagine having to fill out 
paperwork on who will visit you on your last 24 
hours alive. Imagine writing goodbye letters to 
your loved ones. Planning your last meal. Walking 
to each death row inmates' cell, shaking their 
hands while they say 'good luck,' while I was 
responding 'I will be back.' Imagine seeing 
grownup men with tears rolling down their faced 
who you did not know they cared so much about 
you. Imagine filling out papers on who will 
receive your personal property and your dead body."

Davis will go through the motions of waiting for 
a police officer to come in to his cells to take 
all his measurements from shoe size to shoulder 
width. He has been through this twice before.

"They take your shoe size, they measure you up so 
they can find someone your size they can use to 
try out the scenario of the execution," he said 
during our talk on April 27. "They make sure they 
choose the same size guards to attend the 
execution so they can deal with you if you resist them."

Then they will put him in a 35-foot-tall 
isolation cell with a steel toilet, a steel cart 
and a 24-hour camera monitoring him as if he were 
a "museum display," he said. When he went through 
this process before, he was given a Bible, some 
sheets of paper a pen, envelopes and an old 
TV/radio. They gave him clothing that were two 
sizes too big, so that if he tried to fight the 
guards his pants would fall off and he would have 
to surrender because he would be stumbling all over his clothing.

Besides his faith in God, Davis says one person 
has kept him sane through his years in prison -- 
his "angel," his older sister Martina Correia, a 
breast cancer survivor who has been by his side 
for all these years, even when the strength to 
fight seemed to fade away. He said without her he 
would have probably given up on life and freedom much earlier.

"Watching how Martina sacrificed her dreams to 
free her brother inspired me to fight harder and 
helped me to think about my family before I 
allowed myself to get into any trouble that would 
keep me from seeing them," said Davis on a letter 
dated April 8. "I thank God for her daily. I want 
to build her a house, I want to put her son De 
Jaun through college so he can follow his dream 
to find a cure for Cancer, which is what she is fighting."

Correia splits her free time working as an 
executive director of the National Black 
Leadership Initiative on Cancer and as the 
National Steering Committee Chair for Amnesty 
International. She travels the world in the name 
of her brother, because innocence matters for everyone, she said.

"We are in this fight to win," she said in an 
email exchange on Sept. 2. "I do it for the man 
he is. I will rest when he is free."

The "stay tough" attitude seems to run in the 
family. It comes through in a letter from Davis 
written right after the Georgia Supreme Court 
denied him a new trial. A new execution date was 
looming, but Davis was still sure justice would prevail.

"Personally I think things will work out before 
then," he wrote in his last letter to me, dated 
Sept. 18, 2008. "I'll be home living the life of a free man soon."



© 2008 American Observer All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/104293/





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