Troy Davis execution raises old questions, new challenges

Davis’ execution must not be viewed solely within the context of the state of Georgia and its death penalty laws. In fact, the federal government played a pivotal role in his legal lynching.

Although a federal court evidentiary hearing was held in 2009, the judge refused to overturn the death penalty despite the lack of physical evidence and the recanting of testimony by numerous witnesses from the initial trial in 1991. On the evening of the execution, the U.S. Supreme Court failed to issue a requested stay, without providing any legal explanation.

The Obama administration refused to address the case until after Troy Davis was executed, under the guise that it would have been inappropriate since the case involved legal issues within the Georgia judicial system. President Obama is not an opponent of the death penalty.

The argument that the federal government cannot intervene to override state laws and actions that violate constitutional law is the same rationale that was used during the Confederacy over the question of slavery. Even after the Civil War, in the Reconstruction period, former planters cried foul, that the federal government could not impose on states due process rights supposedly guaranteed under the 14th Amendment and voting rights mandated by the 15th Amendment.

During the struggle for civil rights, segregationists argued that the federal government had no right to mandate the breakdown of the Jim Crow system of segregation because it was the law of the Southern states. Similar arguments against the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been advanced by conservative spokespersons in recent years.

Under the Democratic Clinton administration of the 1990s, restrictions were placed on the ability of death row inmates to appeal their cases through the federal courts when there are serious legal discrepancies involved. It was during this period that the U.S. Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994 and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

While Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, was running for president, he broke off campaigning to return to Arkansas in order to sign the death warrant against Ricky Ray Rector, a 40-year-old African-American man with brain damage who was convicted of killing a police officer.

Torrance Stephens of ThyBlackMan.com states, “Rector was executed although the Arkansas Supreme Court said that Rector’s was a case that should be considered for executive clemency. …Clinton continued to state his support for the death penalty after this period. In 1994 he pushed a crime bill through Congress that allowed prosecutors to seek the federal death penalty in 60 more crimes than they could prior, including for murder of a law enforcement officer. He ignored critics who requested a nationwide moratorium on federal executions. He made “three-strikes-you’re-out” the law of the land, so that criminals go to jail for life, with no chance of parole.” (Sept. 19)

Stephens stresses that, “Yes, the fate of Troy Davis is due to the Democratic Party and their hard-line laws against crime, which, when implemented, disparately impact African Americans.” He notes, “In Clinton’s first six years as president, more than 300 people were executed, compared to 185 during the 12 years of the Republican presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.” Under the Clinton administration, during 1997 alone, 74 people were executed —the most in a single year since 1956.

It is ironic that the Obama administration would evoke the rights of states to impose the death penalty against oppressed people in 2011. The fact that the death penalty was imposed and upheld despite reasonable doubt indicates clearly that the federal government, even under a Democratic administration, cannot be relied upon to protect the rights and interests of historically oppressed groups inside the U.S.

End the prison industrial complex