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Workers Vanguard No. 987
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30 September 2011
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Troy Davis Execution: Racist State Murder
Troy Davis is dead. At 11:08 p.m. on September 21, Davis, a
42-year-old black man, was murdered by the legal guardians of the capitalist
ruling class. For 22 years, Davis fought to prove his innocence of the 1989
killing of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia, only to
spend the last moments of his life strapped to an execution gurney. For its
part, the U.S. Supreme Court went through the charade of reviewing his petition
for a last-minute stay of execution. As protests took place around the world,
hundreds of Davis’s supporters rallied outside the Jackson, Georgia,
prison—officially known as the Diagnostic and Classification Prison—while
millions followed the story on TVs, radios and cell phones, hoping for a
semblance of justice for this black man caught in the American “justice” system.
The killing of Troy Davis was racist legal lynching!
In place of hooded KKK nightriders were pin-striped prosecutors and black-robed
judges, along with the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which turned down Davis’s
bid for clemency the day before the execution. In place of the lynch rope were
needles dispensing the life-ending chemical cocktail. The substantial evidence
of Davis’s innocence meant nothing. A white uniformed enforcer of capitalist law
and order had been killed, and this black life had to be taken in return. Here
is a stark demonstration of the workings of the capitalist state—an instrument
of organized violence to protect the class rule and profits of the tiny handful
of capitalists against the workers and the oppressed. The death penalty is the
ultimate sanction of a “justice” system that is not only stacked against workers
and the poor but also, in this society founded on slavery and maintained on a
bedrock of black oppression, racist to its core.
The story of Troy Davis’s frame-up is a familiar one for black
people in this country. In 1991, he was sentenced to death after a frame-up
conviction based on questionable “eyewitness” identifications, dubious accounts
that he confessed and testimony coerced by the cops. Not a shred of physical
evidence linked him to the killing. Seven of the prosecution’s nine witnesses
have since recanted. The only holdouts were a man who may be the actual killer
and another who first denied being able to identify the shooter, only to finger
Davis at trial two years later.
What sets Davis’s case apart were the worldwide calls to stop his
execution, ultimately including even former FBI director William Sessions and
former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr—both staunch proponents of capital
punishment—as well as the Pope and ex-president Jimmy Carter. Protests were held
in cities internationally following the signing of his death warrant on
September 6. In the last days of his life over 600,000 people signed petitions
on Davis’s behalf. Just as a federal court judge last year dismissed evidence of
Davis’s innocence as “smoke and mirrors,” the state authorities answered these
calls for mercy with contempt.
Almost a century ago, Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs powerfully
condemned the barbarism of the death penalty, writing in a May 1913 letter: “The
taking of human life through criminal impulse or in an hour of passion by an
individual is not to be compared to the immeasurably greater crime committed by
the State when it deliberately puts to death the individual charged with such
crime. Society may not consistently condemn murder as long as it is itself
red-handed with that crime.”
As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle and
everywhere—from the capitalist U.S., Japan, Iran and Russia to the Chinese
deformed workers state. This principle applies for the guilty as well as the
innocent. We do not accord the state the right to decide who shall live and who
shall die. Abolish the racist death penalty!
Legacy of Slavery
Other than the U.S. and Japan, every advanced capitalist country
has eliminated capital punishment as part of its criminal code. The European
bourgeoisies are brutally repressive. But the continued use of the death penalty
in the U.S. speaks to the particular depravity of this country’s capitalist
rulers. More fundamentally, capital punishment in the U.S. is rooted in the
origins of its capitalist system, which was built on the backs of black slaves.
Under the Slave Codes, blacks were killed with impunity for “crimes” ranging
from insolence toward whites to rebellion against the slave masters.
This legacy can be seen today in the dungeons of death row. Of the
more than 3,200 men and women there, over 40 percent are black, and another 12
percent are Latino. Among the 36 states that maintain the death penalty,
California has the largest death row population. But capital punishment remains
a largely Southern institution. Over 70 percent of executions since the Supreme
Court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976 have taken place in the states of
the former Confederacy—and more than half of those in Texas and Virginia. In
Davis’s Georgia, black males make up 15 percent of the population but constitute
nearly half of those on death row.
Among those speaking out against the racist death penalty is the
family of James Anderson, a black auto worker who was brutally murdered by
white-supremacists in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 26 (see “Lynch Mob Murder of
Black Worker,” WV No. 985, 2 September). In a letter to the Hinds County
district attorney, Anderson’s sister Barbara Anderson Young asked that he “not
seek the death penalty for anyone involved in James’ murder,” noting the
family’s religious opposition to capital punishment. She added, “We also oppose
the death penalty because it historically has been used in Mississippi and the
South primarily against people of color for killing whites.”
The cheapness of black life to the American ruling class is evident
not just in who is sent to death row, but also in whose loss of life constitutes
a capital offense. Although blacks and whites are murder victims in roughly the
same numbers, 80 percent of those executed have been convicted of killing a
white person. Just hours before Troy Davis was put to death, the state of Texas
executed Lawrence Brewer, one of three racist thugs convicted for the gruesome
1998 killing of James Byrd, a black man who was decapitated as he was dragged to
death from the back of a pickup truck. While Texas has carried out over 470
executions since 1976, Brewer became only the second white person ever executed
in the state for the murder of a black person.
The discriminatory application of the death penalty was sanctified
by the U.S. Supreme Court 24 years ago in the case of Warren McCleskey, a black
prisoner who was executed in Georgia in 1991. McCleskey’s attorneys presented
the Court with an authoritative study detailing that black people in Georgia
convicted of killing whites were sentenced to death 22 times more
frequently than those convicted of killing blacks. In rejecting McCleskey’s
appeal, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged that to accept this premise
would throw “into serious question the principles that underlie our entire
criminal justice system.” In its callous pronouncement, the court expressed a
basic truth. McCleskey was a victim of the racism that pervades the criminal
justice system—who the cops stop on the street, who the prosecutors choose to
indict, what charges and sentences are sought, who sits on juries, who gets
paroled and who gets executed.
The buildup to Troy Davis’s execution sparked something of a public
discussion on capital punishment in the bourgeois press, especially as it
intersected the ascendance of Texas governor Rick Perry as a leading contender
for the Republican presidential nomination. Earlier this month, Texas
authorities had planned to execute four prisoners in the space of a week. Among
those was Duane Buck, whose September 15 execution was stayed by the Supreme
Court at the last minute. Convicted of killing his former girlfriend and a
friend of hers in 1995, Buck was one of seven black men sentenced to death based
on the “expert” testimony of a Texas prison psychologist that because they were
black they should be expected to engage in violent behavior in the future!
Death Penalty: Bipartisan Policy
At the September 7 Republican candidates’ debate, Perry received a
wild ovation for having overseen 234 executions. He further burnished his
credentials by assuring moderator Brian Williams that this body count never cost
him a wink of sleep. In an editorial titled “Cheering on the Death Machine,” the
New York Times (11 September) declared that Perry’s “attitude about death
may make sense in the hard-edged Republican primaries, but other voters should
have serious doubts about a man who seems to have none.”
There is no question that the sinister Christian fundamentalist
Perry is an outright reactionary, one of several in the Republican contest. But
the Democrats—the other party of racist capitalist rule—are themselves no
slouches in administering the rulers’ assembly line of death. Barack Obama, a
supporter of the death penalty, refused to intervene as time ran out for Davis,
with press secretary Jay Carney declaring: “It is not appropriate for the
president of the United States to weigh in on specific cases like this one,
which is a state prosecution.”
Obama was not so shy about “weighing in” on the case of death row
political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther spokesman and a MOVE
supporter who was framed up and sentenced to death on false charges of killing a
Philadelphia police officer in 1981. State and federal courts have repeatedly
refused to hear the massive evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including another
man’s confession to the killing. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Michael
Smerconish, a right-wing Philadelphia journalist leading the calls for Mumia’s
head, asked Obama about Mumia’s case. According to Smerconish, Obama replied by
denying knowing much about the case while assuring him nevertheless that anyone
convicted of killing a cop should be executed or imprisoned for life.
What to expect of the Democrats can be seen in the case of Shaka
Sankofa, who was executed in June 2000 at the height of the presidential
campaign in the face of international opposition similar to that which sought to
stop Davis’s execution. As then-governor of Texas George W. Bush and his
advisers weighed the political risks of stopping the execution—or not—his
Democratic opponent, Al Gore, not only reaffirmed his commitment to the death
penalty but gave the go-ahead to execute a likely innocent man, declaring that
“mistakes are inevitable.” Eight years earlier, Bill Clinton interrupted his
first presidential campaign by flying back to Arkansas, where he was governor,
to oversee the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a brain-damaged black man.
The liberals at the New York Times may be appalled that Rick
Perry and the Republican right openly revel in state murder and indifference to
the likelihood of killing innocent people. But Perry & Co. are only giving
voice to what has been ruling-class policy—implemented by Democrats and
Republicans alike—to massively bolster the repressive forces of the capitalist
state. It was Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that
cut off the possibilities of presenting new evidence of innocence by
eviscerating the right of federal habeas corpus to overturn state death
sentences. By 2010, the prison population had reached 2.3 million people, over
half of whom were black and Latino, the majority convicted on nonviolent drug
charges. In the calculations of the American bourgeoisie, the urban ghettos,
which used to provide a reservoir of unskilled labor for the auto plants and
steel mills, are simply written off as an expendable population, revealing the
racist rulers’ impulse to genocide.
While a widely cited poll shows that nearly two-thirds of the
population continues to support the death penalty, there has been a drop in
public support over the past several years. The fact that more than 130 people
on death row have been proven innocent since 1973, including through DNA testing
in recent years, has given sections of the ruling class some pause in the
accelerated rush to execution, and juries have become a little more reluctant to
issue death sentences. On March 9, Illinois became the fifth state since 2004 to
eliminate the death penalty.
In their attempts to fine-tune the system of capitalist repression,
liberals often promote the living death of “life without parole” as an
alternative to state execution. A New York Times (12 September) editorial
upholds life without parole as “a sound option” in capital cases even though it
complains that this sentence is otherwise often misused. The Times
pointed out that blacks make up 56.4 percent of those serving life without
parole in the U.S. but only 37.5 percent of the country’s prison population.
This statistic further underscores that there can be no fair or “humane” system
of “justice” for minorities or for the working class as a whole in a society
based on the exploitation of labor and maintained through the special oppression
of black people.
While the face of death row is now primarily black and Latino,
fighters for labor’s cause have also been targeted for death by the capitalist
state: the Haymarket anarchists, labor organizers who fought for the eight-hour
day and were put to death in 1877; IWW organizer Joe Hill, executed in 1915;
anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti, who died in the electric chair in 1927.
This ruling-class venom toward those perceived as challenging their oppressive
rule is seen today in the death sentence hanging over the head of Mumia, a
prize-winning journalist renowned as a powerful voice for the oppressed.
Following the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, James P. Cannon,
founder and secretary of the International Labor Defense, wrote: “It is the
vengeful, cruel and murderous class which the workers must fight and conquer
before the regime of imprisonment, torture and murder can be ended. This is the
message from the chair of death. This is the lesson of the Sacco-Vanzetti case”
(“A Living Monument to Sacco and Vanzetti,” Labor Defender, October
1927). This too must be the lesson of the case of Troy Davis, whose murder at
the hands of the state will be avenged when a workers party leads all the
exploited and oppressed in a socialist revolution that sweeps away the entire
barbaric apparatus of capitalist repression.
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