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Writer's Notation: When I first set out to write this piece, it was unambiguously from the perspective of Troy Davis' innocence and the monumental affront of lynching a man under the rubric of jurisprudence. Upon cursory research, I realized that I was way off base in my starting point. My conclusion, however, remains intact.
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The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library sits ensconced in Ventura County's toney Simi Valley.
Dedicated in 1991, the $60 million tab for the original 153,000 square feet - double the most ever plunked down for a presidential library - was picked up by a veritable pantheon of Republican corporate paymasters, including Walter Annenberg, Lew Wasserman, Lodwrick Cook, Joe Albritton, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Sills, and John P. McGovern.
But somehow the tribute to the Gipper didn't seem quite vulgar enough, for in 2004, the same crowd ponyed up another undisclosed tranche of tax-deductible cash to fund the Air Force One Pavilion - a 90,000 square foot reliquary designed to showcase the Boeing VC-137C that served as the official presidential aircraft from 1973-2001.
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| Implemented under the smarmy title Operation Homeward Bound, Boeing disassembled the decommissioned flying Oval Office and transported it to the new Reagan Library Pavilion in pieces where it was restored to museum quality and mounted on buttresses 25-feet above the blinding travertine floors. |
But they weren't done yet. In the run-up to Regan's one hundredth birthday in 2011, the Reagan Presidential Foundation shook down GE stockholders for another $15 million to throw a two-year birthday bash deemed Ronald Reagan Centennial Celebration. The centerpiece was a state-of-the-art General Electric Theater, named for the the NBC television series which Reagan hosted as pitchman from 1954-1962.
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| A life-long Democrat and former president of the Hollywood Screen Actors' Guild, Reagan's conversion to Republican corporate shill proved a quick understudy, as he seamlessly ballyhooed GE's Corporate Citizenship tagline. Accordingly, visitors to the Reagan Library can now watch 208 digitally-enhanced and colorized episodes of the General Electric Theater, the original info-mercials, replete with his signature pitches. |
Indeed the veritable apotheoses of Ronald Wilson Reagan by his hyper-partisan supplicants stands in singular bewilderment to the unanointed. Twice-married, he seldom went to church, and had an estranged relationship with three of his five children children. The man who raised taxes seven of the eight years he was in office; raised the debt ceiling eighteen separate unopposed times; increased the national debt from $700 billion to $2 trillion; turned settled Keynesian theory on its head with the spectacularly failed supply-side economics; presided over the jaw-dropping felonies of Iran-Contra; and spent the better part of his second term in the fog of incipient Alzheimers - hardly seems a candidate for sainthood to the anarcho-capitalists that control his party today.
Notwithstanding, on September 7, 2011, the 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls made the hajj to Semi Valley to genuflect shoulder-to-shoulder in the Temple of the Secularly Infallible.
Their holy sacrament: to convince the faithful of their singular credentials, if nominated, to vanquish the dreaded interloper, Manchurian Candidate, thief of presidential history, and avowed communist intent on destroying America as we know it: one Barack Hussein Obama.
When queried if he had lost any sleep over it, the preening Perry, in his imperious lock-and-load demeanor, smirked and gratuitously obliged his audience: No sir, I've never struggled with that at all. The room brayed with approval. The long moments of macabre amusement spoke embarrassing volumes in the decades-long animus that stokes the cultural fires of our sociopolitical discourse.
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By sharp contrast was the infamous cultural dustup that took place between Perry's predecessor, then Governor George W. Bush, and the religious right, in the run up to convicted murderess Karla Faye Tucker's 1998 execution - the first woman put to death by Texas in 130 years.
According to court records, in June of 1983, after spending a weekend hopped-up on drugs, Karla Faye Tucker and her boyfriend Danny Garrett conspired to steal and fence valuable motorcycle parts from a mutual acquaintance, Jerry Dean. Their gambit: more money to purchase yet more illicit drugs.
Upon breaking in Dean's apartment, they found him, presumably alone, asleep in his bedroom. Tucker jumped on Dean and restrained him while Garrett repeatedly bludgeoned him in the back of the head with a claw hammer. The blows caused the mortally-wounded Dean's airway to fill with fluid, producing a gurgling sound which got on Tucker's nerves. Obsessed with stifling the noise, she buried a pickax in Dean's chest, finishing him off in short order.
While Garrett was loading motorcycle parts into their van, Dean's traumatized girlfriend, Deborah Thornton, who had been holed up in the bedroom during the mayhem, accidentally disclosed her presence. Tucker attacked Thornton with the pickax and ultimately embedded it in her heart, another lethal blow. Tucker would later brag to friends that she experienced intense multiple orgasms with each blow of the pickax. Well okay.
Sentenced to death in 1984 (along with Garrett who expired on death-row of natural causes), Karla Faye Tucker would subsequently adopt the persona of a model death-row inmate, owing to a cell block conversion to Christ Jesus and tireless ministry to the incarcerated at the Mountain View Female Prison in Gatesville, Texas. Indeed, she feel in love with, and married, her prison chaplain Dana Lane Brown. She would resolutely repent, chalking up her atrocities solely to the influence of demon drugs.
In whipsaw cultural revolt, the religious right elevated the beatific soft-spoken white woman to celebrity sainthood, demanding her life be unconditionally spared. Those appealing to the State of Texas on her behalf read like a who's-who of the Christian right, including: Pope John Paul II, then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, televangelist Pat Robertson, and Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell.
The unambiguous double standard for a born-again, white women, as contrasted with the stereotypical framed and under-defended black man, was not lost to the progressive media - irrespective of her self-confession and the heinousness of her felony murders.
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In a media ratings-buster, Karla Faye was even afforded the rarefied cameo of appealing for clemency on CNN's Larry King show in a live feed from Texas' Mountain View Prison. After an endless string of tear-jerking media-saturated appeals, when the Texas Pardons and Parole Board ultimately turned her down, Dubya, caught between a political rock and a hard place, also declined to oblige her - to the outrage - outrage, I tell you - of Christian fundamentalists. On February 3, 1998, she was offed by lethal injection.
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| Obviously not fans of Karla Faye Tucker, demonstrators advocate a more inventive method of extinction in the run-up to her execution for self-confessed felony murders. |
Carlson: Did you meet with any of them? Bush: No, I didn't meet with any of them! he snapped, as though I'd just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview, though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' Carlson: What was her answer?Bush: Please, don't kill me, Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation.
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Refresh to: September 21, 2011. It was a single piece of stationery with the understated indesia of the Supreme Court of the United States debossed across the top, but it ordered that Troy Davis' life was about to end by lethal injection.
With withering economy of language, the decree read: The application for stay of execution of the sentence of death presented to Justice [Clarence] Thomas and, by him, referred to the Court is denied.
The gobsmacking irony of Clarence Thomas - the Supreme Court's only black face and unrepentant right-wing corporate toolbox - trivializing the life of a fellow black man, outrageously from his selfsame hometown, stood in stunning juxtaposition to their respective life experiences. Indeed, Justice Thomas' entire professional life begs the question: should staking a career out of not living up to the expectations of his peers be a crime? One concludes: not necessarily, unless perhaps his chosen field is one of public service. Go figure.
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| Notoriously mute Justice Clarence Thomas gets it down off-the-bench with wife Virginia (Ginni) Lamp Thomas, CEO and founder of Liberty Central, a right-wing lobby shop engaged in the shameless shake-down of corporations, many of which have had pending Supreme Court cases. Thomas falsified his annual financial disclosure forms to the tune of $700,000 in Ginni's take-home pay, for years 2003-2007, from the Heritage Foundation, a partisan Republican propaganda mill. When challenged by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Yale Law School grad Thomas gratuitously lied: "I didn't understand the forms." |
Troy Anthony Davis had been on death row at Georgia's Jackson Prison for the past 22-years. He had been convicted of the 1989 shooting death of Savannah police officer, Mark Allen MacPhail, who was working private security guard the evening of his murder.
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| (L) Murder victim Mark Allen MacPhail shortly before enlisting in the Savannah Police Department. (R) Convicted assailant Troy Anthony Davis. |
There was plenty to grieve for in the tragically extinguished life of 27-year-old Mark MacPhail, who was executed - yes executed - at the barrel of two .38 caliber pistol rounds: the first through his lungs and descending aorta, the second point-blank in his boyish face as he lay convulsing on the pavement. He bled-out and died within minutes in the suffocating South Georgia August heat, on the filthy oil-stained asphalt, outside a Burger King drive-up window, in Savannah's notoriously rough, black, Yamacraw district.
A staunchly-raised and über-patriotic military brat, Mark's father was a retired Army colonel. White, handsome, and buff, with an ingratiating adolescent grin, he had enlisted at the age of eighteen and served six years as a U.S. Army Ranger, married his high school sweetheart, and come back home to enlist in the Savannah Police Department where he had served with distinction for three years.
In addition to a grieving wife and mother, he left behind a two-year-old daughter, an infant son, doting parents, and countless friends, colleagues, and relatives. Hundreds of mourners, replete with local, state, and federal law enforcement officials - including a half-mile-long motorcycle entourage along Savannah's venerable palm-studded Victory Drive - attended his funeral at the historic Trinity Lutheran Church.
As we are want to say in the South: "It don't hardly get no worse than that."
By contrast, there was plenty of reasons not to empathize with Troy Davis. His father, an alcoholic Korean War vet, abandoned his family when Troy was five. His mother, an hourly healthcare employee, worked long and irregular hours, leaving Troy, and his two younger sisters, latchkey kids.
Troy was characterized as a poor student, dropping out of school in the eleventh grade. He was in-and-out of scrapes with the law most of his adolescent and adult life, universally known by the sobriquet Rah, street acronym for Rough as Hell. The crowd he ran with was notoriously sociopathic and known to be involved with narcotics. He had at least one prior gun charge for which he served probation. He once enlisted in the Marines but flunked the induction requirements due to his criminal priors. His civilian work record was sketchy to nonexistent.
As might be vulgarly called-out by ubiquitous white Southerners: "He was a sorry nigger." - without a scintilla of compunction between the corollary - "sorry white trash."
Somewhere around midnight the evening before the crime, Troy Davis and his pal Darrell Collins were carousing and up to no good. They were at a party where they became embroiled in a stupefied argument over the connubial status of - and discourse with - certain girls in attendance.
Shortly thereafter, several involved in the altercation - including a Michael Cooper - decided to leave in a car. Davis and Collins reportedly tailed them outside on foot. As the car pulled out, passengers reportedly yelled insults and threw beer bottles. Packing heat, Davis fired several pistol shots into the offending vehicle. At least one bullet hit home, in Michael Cooper's jaw, wounding him superficially, as it turns out. Witnesses identified the gunman as wearing a white T-shirt with a [nondescript] printed applique on the front.
Michael Cooper was puking drunk at the time and barely knew who he was, much less where he was, when he arrived at the ER. Following protocol for shooting admissions, the hospital summoned police who took statements and searched the car in which Cooper was riding for evidence. A single .38 caliber shell was gouged out of the front seat passenger headrest.
About 1:30 a.m., Davis and Collins met up with another bro of theirs, Red Coles, who was engaged in an altercation with a vagrant - identified as Larry Young - ostensibly over the all-important ownership of a warm beer, in a desultorily lit Burger King parking lot next door to the Greyhound bus station.
Davis and Collins joined Coles in accosting Young. Young would later testify that Troy Davis struck him across the face with a pistol. MacPhail who was working private security detail with Greyhound, witnessed the commotion and took off across the adjoining parking lot in an effort to intervene.
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| View of Burger King parking lot from Greyhound Buss Station parking lot where Mark MacPhail was stationed |
Troy Davis - wearing a white Batman T-shirt - fired at MacPhail, striking him in the chest. MacPhail collapsed, writhing on the pavement, before ever reaching the scuffle. Then Davis, fearing that MacPhail had seen his face (according to Collins' testimony) calculatedly squeezed-off another shot into his head to ensure he'd never talk. Then the three - Davis, Collins, and Coles - hightailed it into the Savannah darkness before authorities could arrive.
Let's put a lot of practical clarity in this thing. From a forensic standpoint, the situation could not have been more intractable: a poorly lit parking lot in a notoriously crime-ridden barrio; three truculent black men, probably drinking and/or doping, at least one of which was armed and loaded for bear; a homeless drunkard, an explosive altercation with gunfire; a dead cop; those directly involved scattered like the wind; and a spontaneous melee of adrenalin-amped opportunistic gawkers, from the Burger King and adjacent Greyhound bus station, notoriously worthless eye witnesses, virtually assured to dissemble when confronted with the law.
Notwithstanding, a gratuitous cop-killing seldom sets in motion the wheels of pedantic justice. For that, the Savannah Police Department and the Chatham County County District Attorney followed their unspoken marching orders: hunt down, indict, and and convict the perps of this travesty, and petition the State of Georgia to send them to their fucking maker, sooner, rather than later.
That Officer MacPhail died coming to the aid of a black man played heavily in the coverage of the tragedy, substantially defusing racial tension inherent in a signature Old South segregated city, where the forty percent black population lives pretty much below the poverty line.
The next day Red Coles, hardly a selfless witness, hired himself an attorney. Together they went to the Savannah police and reported Coles had witnessed Davis shoot MacPhail with a pistol. Accordingly, Savannah police issued a warrant for Davis on the charge of capital murder.
Under a shoot-to-kill, armed-and-dangerous, dragnet, Davis, accompanied by his sister, went on the lam to Atlanta. At the pleadings of his family, four days' later he also hired himself a lawyer. Driven back to Savannah by his minister, Davis proceeded to turn himself in.
All told, Troy Davis would go up on five contemporaneous charges resulting from his hour-and-a-half mid-summer night's rampage: (1) first degree murder in the shooting death of Mark MacPhail; (2) aggravated assault (drive-by shooting) of Michael Cooper; (3) aggravated assault (pistol whipping) of Larry Young; (4) obstructing an officer of the law in the performance of his duty; and (5) possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony. At trial, Davis plead not-guilty to all charges.
To MacPhail's murder, Davis' defense staunchly maintained his innocence - that when he heard the first shot, he fled running. Coles steadfastly contended that the had witnessed Davis shoot MacPhail. Collins, himself now lawyered-up, would also finger his former bud Davis. The District Attorney produced seven other witnesses, including the assailed Larry Young, willing to attest that Troy Davis was the shooter.
Although the pistol never turned up as evidence, ballistic tests confirmed that the two .38 caliber shells recovered from MacPhail's body were fired from the same gun as a .38 caliber shell recovered from the car in which Michael Cooper was a passenger. A pair of Davis' (reportedly blood-stained) shorts recovered from a clothes dryer in his Mother's home - the day after the incident - were ruled inadmissible for DNA testing, owing to spectacularly sloppy investigative work: in their haste, Savannah police had failed to secure a proper search warrant.
On August 28, 1991, after three days' testimony, a jury composed of five whites and seven blacks - after less than two hours' deliberation - found Davis guilty on all five charges. Two days later, the same peers spent seven hours to arrive unanimously at the sentence: death by lethal injection.
Curiously, the testimonies did not begin to unravel until 2000 - nine years' after the fact. The first to break rank was Larry Young, the genesis of the incident. In an interview with CBS News, he said that police suborned him to finger Davis. (One would think that Young, if anybody, knew who pulled the trigger - setting him up as an outrageous liar - either way.)
Another prime witness, Jeffrey Sapp, recounted that he was pressured to testify that Davis privately confessed to him. Sapp would later recant and deny having spoken with Davis.
Accomplice Collins confessed that police threatened him with the charge of accessory to murder if he didn't finger Davis. All told seven of the nine witness have since recanted all, or parts, of their testimony.
Davis' execution was halted no less than three times since 2007. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court even granted him a rarefied chance to clearly establish his innocence in a lower court.
But the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Georgia found that Davis' defense attorneys didn't meet that standard in an excruciatingly detailed 172-page ruling. Its conclusion: the recanted testimonies were suspect because they were not given under oath and prosecutors never got the opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses in court. After that hearing, SCOTUS declined to take up his case again.
On September 21, 2011 Troy Anthony Davis was administered a triple lethal injection of pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. At 11.08 pm he was pronounced dead.
Seldom, if ever, has a U.S. death row tableau captured such international notoriety - both for sympathy of Troy Davis, and the exercise of the blunt instrument of death as part and parcel to a clearly imperfect criminal justice system.
Summarizes oft-cited liberal blogger Julian Kunnie:
The arrogance of a system, the only one of its kind in the Western industrialized world, that views capital punishment as the meting of a justice, leaves a lot to be desired in the quest of justice given the United States’ history of injustice particularly against Black and all poor people.
Hence the championing of the cause of Troy Davis by millions of people around the world and in the United States, where over 650,000 petitions to the State of Georgia and organizations such as the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, along with Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu and actors and entertainers like Susan Sarandon and Harry Belafonte, have called for an end to his execution and a new trial.
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| Hundreds of demonstrators converge on the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta to protest the execution of Troy Davis. |
Opined former President Jimmy Carter:
If one of our fellow citizens can be executed with so much doubt surrounding his guilt, then the death penalty system in our country is unjust and outdated.
Lefty flamethrower, filmmaker, and author, Michael Moore amped it up a notch:I will ask my publisher to pull my book from every Georgia bookstore and if they won't do that I will donate every dime of every royalty [it] makes in Georgia to help defeat the racists and killers who run that state.
Retired Chatham County district attorney, Spencer Lawton, who originally prosecuted the case had a dispassionate different take, in a 09/20/11 interview with CNN:
There is the legal case, the case in court, and the public relations case. We have consistently won the case as it has been presented in court. We have consistently lost the case as it has been presented in the public realm, on TV and elsewhere...It has been a game of delay throughout. The longer the delay, the more time they have to create not doubt, not honest doubt, not real doubt, but the appearance of doubt. And there are people who have not troubled themselves to acquaint themselves with the record, who don't know the facts, who do oppose the death penalty and who have been willing on the strength of that emotion alone to assume the truth of the allegations of the weakness of evidence in the case...It's just been my policy, that I not comment on a pending case - and this case has been pending for two decades. For two decades, I've maintained my silence. That meant I could never respond...So we have been at an extreme disadvantage in the public relations campaign for that reason, because we felt that we were ethically bound to maintain our silence and express our opinions and judgments on the facts in court, which is where we have. And every place we have, we have won...I have no brief for the death penalty. If it were to evaporate tomorrow, it would suit me fine. On the other hand, it is a part of, a component of, Georgia's law and that's what I was sworn to uphold.
Prosecutor Lawton also said the question of duress cuts both ways.I think that what you would find is there was as much duress applied to get the affidavits [by Davis' supporters] as the affidavits [from the witnesses] are said to contain allegations of duress on the part of police.
Prosecutor Lawton on Catholic church numerator Joseph Ratzinger's [Pope Benedict XVI] impassioned weigh-in:
This is not something I had previously thought the Holy See had expertise in, that is to say [The State of] Georgia's evidentiary rules.
Lawton additionally questioned why it took Davis' lawyers so long to get the witnesses to recant and why they then waited until eight days before Davis' first scheduled execution to make their statements public.
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| Georgia State Capitol overwrought demonstrators decry Georgia's murder in their name. |
In conclusion, there are certainly arguments that Troy Davis should not have been put to death. But a rational contention that there was reasonable doubt as to his guilt - or that he was actually innocent - is not a serious argument.
Again and again, courts ruled Davis' conviction as being on legally solid ground. To reiterate, last year, the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of directing that a District Judge scrutinize and hold fresh hearings because seven out of nine eyewitnesses had supposedly recanted their testimony.
For that, Davis’s lawyers declined to put two of those witnesses on the stand, making their affidavits of almost no value. Judge William Moore, a Clinton appointee, found that of the five others, two did not, in fact, alter their original evidence and two lacked any credibility. He found that one, a jailhouse snitch, had genuinely recanted - but that it had been clear in the original trial he was a liar.
Judge Moore concluded that: the fresh evidence Davis' attorney had gathered amounted to little more than smoke and mirrors and the vast majority of the evidence at trial remains intact.
In an unprecedented coda, Moore added that: there has never been a scintilla of evidence that Davis' race has ever been a factor in his initial conviction or in it being upheld.
By contrast, to characterize a two-decade legal process that twice went to the highest court in the land as a lynching - as was frequently assessed in the liberal media - is to strip the word of all meaning.
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So where the hell are we? Please indulge my grossly anecdotal sampling of but two hyper-controversial death penalty cases - Karla Faye Tucker and Troy Anthony Davis - one self-confessed, the other not. Clearly, both guilty verdicts were rational and well within the rubric of beyond reasonable doubt - as understood by the average man on the street.
Accordingly, the sole issue is the application of the death penalty. Both cases rose to the level of public outrage: Tucker's from the impassioned right - and Davis' from the impassioned left - of the political spectrum. Therein lies the conclusion: when viewed from through the prism of human vicissitudes, we are collectively not up to affording government the ultimate power to kill its citizens, in an act of jurisprudence.
More practically: a system that has made itself powerless to give effect to its judicial verdicts in less than two decades should get out of the business of making such pronouncements.
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In a 1994 opinion dissenting from the Supreme Court's denying review in a Texas death penalty case (Callins v. Collins), Justice Harry Blackmun penned the following majestic phrases. Never was there a more moving and impassioned rebuke of the death penalty as an institution:
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| Justice Harry Blackmun (1908-1999); SCOTUS (1970-1994): appointed by President Richard M. Nixon and confirmed by the Senate 94-0; a life-long Republican, he distinguished himself as a card-carrying liberal, even becoming a passionate proponent for abortion rights in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade. |
Bruce Edwin Callins will be executed tomorrow by the state of Texas. Intravenous tubes attached to his arms will carry the instrument of death, a toxic fluid designed specifically for the purpose of killing human beings. The witnesses will behold Callins strapped to a gurney, seconds away from extinction. Within days, or perhaps hours, the memory of Callins will begin to fade. The wheels of justice will churn again, and somewhere, another jury or another judge will have the task of determining whether some human being is to live or die.
We hope that the defendant whose life is at risk will be represented by someone who is inspired by the awareness that a less-than-vigorous defense could have fatal consequences for the defendant. We hope that the attorney will investigate all aspects of the case, follow all evidentiary and procedural rules, and appear before a judge committed to the protection of defendants' rights.
But even if we can feel confident that these actors will fulfill their roles, our collective conscience will remain uneasy. Twenty years have passed since this court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly and with reasonable consistency or not at all, and despite the effort of the states and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination and mistake.
From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored to develop rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved, I feel obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.
Perhaps one day this court will develop procedural rules or verbal formulas that actually will provide consistency, fairness and reliability in a capital-sentencing scheme. I am not optimistic that such a day will come. I am more optimistic, though, that this court eventually will conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness 'in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that it and the death penalty must be abandoned altogether.' (Godfrey v. Georgia, 1980) I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive. The path the court has chosen lessen us all.
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