The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 72/No. 39      October 6, 2008

 
Supporters of Troy Davis win
temporary stay of execution
(front page)
 
Militant/Bill Arth
Martina Correia, sister of Troy Davis, speaks at rally at Georgia State Capitol September 11 demanding halt to execution of Davis who won a last-minute temporary stay September 23.

BY CLAY DENNISON  
ATLANTA—On September 23, less than two hours before Troy Davis was to be put to death in Jackson, Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a six-day stay of execution.

In Jackson, Davis’s relatives and supporters who thought they had said their last goodbyes to him cried and broke into song when they heard the news. In Atlanta, 200 supporters of Davis celebrated as they gathered on the steps of the Georgia State Capitol for what many had thought would be a vigil for his execution.

Davis was convicted of killing an off-duty cop and sentenced to death in 1991 on the word of nine witnesses. Seven of them have since recanted, saying that police pressured them to testify falsely against him. There was no physical evidence tying Davis to the murder.

A judge in Chatham County had signed a death warrant for Davis on September 3 that allowed the state to kill him six days before the U.S. Supreme Court ended a summer recess. On the day set for the execution, the Supreme Court met in emergency session to rule on Davis’s appeal for a hearing.

The stay is through Monday, September 29, when the Supreme Court will decide whether they will hear his case. If they decide not to hear it, the stay will be lifted immediately and Davis may be executed. If the court decides to take the case up, the stay will remain in force until the final ruling is handed down. On September 18, six days after the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles turned down Davis’s appeal for clemency, more than 300 people marched from downtown Atlanta to a rally at the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

At the meeting after the march, Rev. Raphael Warnock called Davis’s threatened execution “an act of state murder.” He, as well as Davis’s sister, Martina Correia, referred to the song “Strange Fruit,” written about lynching. “When Billie Holiday was talking about strange fruit, she was talking about Black bodies hanging on trees in Georgia. And let me tell you something, if you’re poor, you could be hanging from that same tree,” she said.

She stressed that no matter what would happen on September 23, there is a fight that has to continue. “I want to make sure that you understand that this does not stop with Troy. There are a whole lot of other Troy Davises around the country.”

Former U.S. president James Carter called on the parole board to reverse its denial of clemency for Davis. “Executing Troy Davis without a real examination of potentially exonerating evidence risks taking the life of an innocent man and would be a grave miscarriage of justice,” Carter said.
 
 
Related articles:
Georgia SWP: ‘Free Troy Davis!’
Los Angeles-area police killed 35 people this year
Workers jailed in Chicago for misdemeanors, but kept incarcerated by immigration police  
 
 
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