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 jurney.
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!
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¿Qué debe sentir un inocente camino del patíbulo, Señor?
...¿As protests took place around the world?
¿Han oído alguna vez los Estados Unidísimos
a las protestas del mundo?
¿Quíenes se creen, realmente,
los Estados Unidísimos que son?
¿En qué clase de "Manifest of Destiny"
se creen embarcados
por los mares, tierras y espacios del mundo,
que sólo a la imagen reflejada
en el espejo de su narcicismo
le conceden importancia y atención?
"In God We Trust".
¿En qué clase de Dios se cree
en ésta oración grabada en el dinero,
en el becerro de oro que hay que adorar?
¿Dónde está el perdón,
o, en éste caso, la rectificación?
In place of the lynch rope were needles dispensing the life-ending chemical cocktail.
En lugar de la soga del linchamiento
...el cocktail químico para acabar con la vida
...de un esclavo de la actual Plantación de Algodón.
Un 'algodón' que sigue siendo blanco
de los blancos.
Una 'plantación' de amos blancos
de dónde los importados de Africa
aún no han salido.
Una esclavitud, que, con otras tramoyas y decorados,
ha sustituido al látigo por el 'voto'.
Un régimen dónde,
aúnque el 'Presidente' sea negro
...su "blancura de algodón" sigue intácta.
¿Qué debe sentir un inocente camino del patíbulo, Señor?
