This past Sept. 21, a man named Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed in Texas. He went to his death without so much as a whimper of protest. Brewer went to his death without howls of protests from supporters, and without much media fanfare. About five hours later that same night, a man named Troy Anthony Davis was executed in Georgia. Davis went out whining about his innocence to the bitter end.
Davis had a plethora of supporters opposing his death sentence, among them Pope Benedict XVI, former President Jimmy Carter, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its president and CEO, Benjamin Todd Jealous, National Action Network leader Al Sharpton and far too many bloggers, protesters and second-guessers of the jury’s verdict to count.
If you watched CNN in the days leading up to Davis’ execution on Sept. 21, you might have listened to quite a few stories about Davis and his supporters’ efforts to not have him executed. You could lose both hands and still count the number of stories CNN did about Brewer on one of them.
Brewer is one of three men convicted of dragging James Byrd to his death in Jasper, Texas, in 1998. Brewer and his two fellow miscreants are white; Byrd was black. I’m sure you’re starting to get the picture now.
Davis was black. He was convicted in the fatal 1989 shooting of off-duty Savannah, Ga., police Officer Mark MacPhail. MacPhail was white. Neither he, nor Brewer, was of any use to the liberal horde constantly in search of black bodies to feed their maw of victimhood.
Those who protested Davis’ execution and supported him in his final days will no doubt protest. They will claim — and indeed many have claimed — that their motives were to prevent the execution of an “innocent” man. What was their proof of Davis’ innocence?
Seven of nine prosecution witnesses who testified against Davis at his trial and identified him as the man who shot MacPhail recanted their testimony. And there was no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime — or so his supporters claimed.
The Internet era requires inquisitive minds to wade through a mess of self-appointed experts, wannabe journalists and self-righteous bloggers, in this case who believed Davis was innocent and accepted any evidence that seemed to point in that direction. But guess what? There was indeed physical evidence in the Davis case.
For one thing, there were matching shell casings recovered from the scene of the MacPhail shooting and an earlier shooting near a pool party, when Davis shot one Michael Cooper in the jaw. The “innocent” man Davis, as his supporters usually omit, was indeed convicted of shooting Cooper.
There were also Davis’ shorts, although these were excluded from the trial. After the MacPhail shooting, Savannah police searched the home of Davis’ mother and recovered them, spotted with what appeared to be blood — more physical evidence. But judges threw out that evidence because it was retrieved without a warrant.
William T. Moore, a federal district judge, went through all the recanted statements and reviewed them completely. He found some recantations not credible, found others not to be recantations at all. The judge chided Davis’ lawyers for submitting affidavits from some witnesses who claimed Davis’ associate Sylvester “Redd” Coles was the shooter. Moore said that Davis’ lawyers wanted to implicate Coles, but didn’t want to call him as a witness to refute claims that he was the shooter.
Was Davis innocent? Assume for a moment that Coles shot MacPhail. Did Davis report that to police? He did not. He went to Atlanta.
Did Davis try to stop Coles from pistol-whipping Larry Young, the homeless man MacPhail tried to help?
He did not. Was Troy Davis an “innocent” man?
No, he was not.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
