Following up on my earlier post, this afternoon the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles received petitions with over 663,000 names seeking clemency for Troy Anthony Davis:
Davis’ supporters, led by Amnesty International and the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, appeared at the board’s offices and handed over 15 boxes filled with petitions, Amnesty Laura Moye said. The board, which will hear Davis’ clemency petition Monday, also was given letters signed by more than 1,500 legal professionals, more than 3,300 religious leaders, 26 death-row exonerees and 110 relatives of murder victims asking for Davis’ execution to be halted.
His legal appeals are exhausted and the chances of him winning another reprieve are slight. You can sign the petition here. Davis’s sister has started another directed to Chatham Count DA Larry Chisholm. In Atlanta there was a candlelight vigil tonight and will be a rally tomorrow (Friday).
Seven of the nine witnesses who testified against Davis have recanted. Time and again the witnesses said on the stand that fear of the police, fear of their own criminality catching up to them, and fear they’d face retribution caused them to lie on the witness stand.
Some characterize that as a big “red flag…impossible to overlook.”
Not me. For me it has the ring of truth. Won’t you please take a moment to consider the reasonableness of those fears.
Douglas A. Blackmon, author the Pulitzer prize winning book, Slavery by Another Name – The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, on how the legal system in the South was systematically used to coerce tens of thousands of Black men into brutal forced labor (what Blackmon calls “neoslavery):
Across the South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas, thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested, often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when I was still a boy. […] There’s no way that anybody can read this book and come away still wondering why there is a sort of fundamental cultural suspicion among African-Americans of the judicial system, for instance. I mean, that suspicion is incredibly well-founded. The judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South became primarily an instrument of coercing people into labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment of lawbreakers.
Read Blackmon’s book. More from him here, here, here, here, and here. Then tell me you’re still skeptical that those witnesses would tell the police what they wanted to hear out of fear.
My doubts are more than merely reasonable.