The Rev. Raphael Warnock told the college students in a church outside the state prison near Jackson Wednesday night that they had joined the fight for racial justice in America with the stand against the execution of Troy Anthony Davis.
The battle was bigger, he said, than saving Davis' life. He said he talked to the condemned man this week and he asked him what he should tell the people.
"He said, "Tell them I am already victorious," said Warnock, the senior pastor at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Stan Gunter had to agree. The executive director of the Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys Council said that Davis and the mega public-relations machine behind him had managed to distort the facts of the murder case down to sound bite of "seven witnesses recanted or they backed off their testimony" which had allowed the well-funded NAACP and Amnesty International to portray Davis as an innocent man.
Court after court has upheld the legitimacy of the Davis conviction for the murder of Savannah Police Officer Mark Allen MacPhail and dismissed his claims of new evidence exonerating him. But despite the fact that the execution appears solidly grounded in law, by Wednesday night Davis' supporters appeared to have grown to include even supporters of the death penalty who doubted its fairness in this case in part because of the forces aligned against it.
NAACP President Benjamin Jealous and Larry Cox, the executive director of Amnesty International, said they hope the Davis case will galvanize public opinion to at least modify death-penalty law and discourage its use if not overturn it. They portrayed Wednesday through a racial lens, which showed a black man being executed unfairly by an oppressive state.
The death-penalty's opponents have already given the state of Georgia's image a bruising, Gunter said. Dignitaries Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and Pope Benedict XVI joined rappers such as Antwan "Big Boi" Patton and Killer Mike in denouncing the killing of man when so much doubt had been raised about his guilt.
"They won the P.R. war," Gunter said. "If the P.R. spin was true, I would agree that we should never have executed him, but it wasn't true."
He noted that the case that has been characterized by opponents of the death penalty as a grave miscarriage of justice had been reviewed by both state and federal courts for fairness for 20 years. The U.S. Supreme Court had taken the extraordinary step of assigning U.S. District Judge William T. Moore to scrutinize the witness testimony to determine whether it raised substantial questions about Davis' guilt. Moore concluded unequivocally in a 174-page ruling that it did not.
"Mr. Davis vastly overstates the value of his evidence of innocence," Moore wrote.
Yet the wave of support continued to grow. Gregory Roachford, of Covington, said he had just started practicing with his band Wednesday, when his mother, Valdora, burst into the room.
"She said, we need to go down to the execution," Roachford said. "It's in our back yard."
Valdora Roachford said she gathered up her nine children and brought them to the protest. , which she didn't leave until 8 p.m. when she learned one daughter had to study for a school test. "It was the least we could do for someone who was wrongfully accused," she said. "There was something about his story that said I need to support this guy."
Others from across the political and economic spectrum who opposed the death penalty discounted the judge's ruling. The European Union, which opposes the death penalty on principle, issued a statement against the execution of Davis because "serious and compelling doubts have persistently surrounded the evidence on which Mr. Davis was convicted."
Protests took place in European countries, such as Great Britain and France this week, calling for Davis' sentence to be commuted. Annabelle Malins, the British consul general in Atlanta, said the Davis case reverberated across Europe because his supporters had cemented doubts about his guilt in the public mind. About 150 people marched in Paris Wednesday and many more last week, said Claire Collobert, press Attaché for the Consulate General of France in Atlanta.
"It has been a case that both our population and our political leaders took an interest in how it turned out," Malins said. “It could be taken as an indicator by members of civil society in terms of how they build their picture of America. I think the fact that it took place in Georgia is something that is probably less relevant. I think it is part of the bigger picture of America.”
Michael Leo Owens, a professor of political science at Emory University, said that if Davis supporters expect this case to be a "game changer" regarding the death penalty, they will likely be in for a disappointment. While Davis' supports were visible around the world in "I Am Troy Davis" t-shirts, the fact is that the death penalty has strong support in America, especially in Georgia.
It was a lesson the supporters outside the prison got Wednesday, many of whom held out hope throughout the evening that a last minute U.S. Supreme Court decision would allow Davis to escape the ultimate punishment.
“There was this invisible support for the execution that didn't need to be shaped or guided, and I think Troy Davis supporters were blindsided by that invisible support,” he said. "It is the dominant perspective."
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