ON WEDNESDAY evening, I was sitting bleary-eyed in front of a computer screen, when one of my sons asked me to come downstairs. He wanted me to join the other family members in saying a rosary for Troy Davis, writes BREDA O'BRIEN
I was completely thrown, and even more so when I went down to the sitting room. It is not that we don’t pray together. We do. But the rosary tends to be reserved for really serious moments, like family bereavements, upcoming operations, or flood waters on Connemara roads rising higher than the wheels of the car.
I had been aware of the upcoming execution of this black man convicted of the murder of a Georgia policeman in 1989. I knew that there were grave doubts about the case and key witnesses were now saying that Davis was not guilty. My reaction was not much more than a shake of the head at the horrors of the US addiction to the death penalty, before turning my mind to other things.
But my white-faced children did not have my adult filters that screen out the emotional reality and full horror of a judicial killing. They were keeping vigil with Troy Davis, albeit in a very modern way.
With rosary beads in one hand and computer screens in the other, they were combing the internet for updates. One was following Twitter. Another was streaming Democracy Now, the independent news organisation (not to be confused with the loose grouping that almost fielded candidates in the last Irish election) – the only continuous coverage they could find.
All four were listening to a really impressive young man, Troy Davis’s nephew De’Jaun Correia, being interviewed. His entire life has been marked by regular visits to his uncle on death row. Although still only a teenager, he has become an articulate advocate for abolition of the death penalty.
Our youngest lad is only 10 and I had a brief, panicked worry about exposing him to something like this. I knew the chances of his prayers being answered were nil. Do you need to know about the rottenness and cynicism of the world in gruesome detail at that age? Too late, whatever my worries.
The Troy Davis case showcases so much that is wrong with the death penalty. For starters, you have much more chance of ending up on death row in the US if you are black. Although to be completely accurate, in Georgia, you have a much greater chance of death row if you kill a white person.
The victim, Mark McPhail, the heroic 27-year-old off-duty policeman who was killed while attempting to defend a homeless person, was white.
In the Davis case, there was no physical evidence, either DNA or a murder weapon, linking the alleged murderer to the killing.
That did not impress US district court judge William Moore in his August 2010 ruling on an appeal. It was not the state’s job to demonstrate a watertight case against Davis, he said. It was up to Troy Davis’s lawyers to show “by clear and convincing evidence that no reasonable juror would have convicted him in the light of the new evidence” that has emerged since his 1991 trial. Under this “extraordinarily high” standard, Judge Moore wrote: “Mr Davis is not innocent.”
Notoriously, supreme court justice Antonin Scalia went even further in 2009. “This court,” Scalia pointed out, “has never held that the constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Justice Scalia believes that there is nothing in the US constitution that prevents the execution of an innocent person, if the original trial is “full and fair”.
Of course, this is also the justice who opined: “It seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe, and has least support in the church-going United States.”
According to Scalia, godless abolitionists are only motivated by a lack of faith in the afterlife. “For the non-believer . . . to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence.” Evidently, in Scalia’s universe, because you despatch the guilty to their maker, judicial killing is no biggie, a view distinctly at odds with his own faith tradition, Catholicism.
Even the most horrific murderers should not receive the death penalty. There is the pragmatic argument that fresh evidence sometimes finds alleged murderers to be innocent, which is of little comfort if the person is already dead.
There is the more important argument that capital punishment has a brutalising effect on society, and lowers still further regard for the sacredness of human life. There is no evidence that capital punishment acts as a deterrent.
Troy Davis was not the only man executed on Wednesday. The white killer of a black man was also executed. James Byrd jnr was dragged behind a truck by avowed white supremacists, a horrific and despicable crime. Unlike members of the McPhail family, who chose to exercise their right to witness the Davis execution, Ross Byrd, James Byrd’s son, declined to attend the execution of his father’s killer.
He believes “you can’t fight murder with murder”, a fact my 10-year-old is also able to grasp. Unfortunately, the US looks unlikely to grasp it any time soon.