Killing in Tha Name of...

"People don't even care when you talk about Black males going to prison. Some people look at it as if  its so cliché. You hear that someone has been killed and the news only approaches the story as crime and safety, not as if someone's friend/son/daughter/mother/father/uncle/aunt was taken away... "

Me in July

I'm in a very somber mood following the death murder of Troy Davis by the Georgia government.  In fact, its taken me longer than I expected to write this piece about Davis because of all the mixed emotions involved.

After 22 years of being on death row and 22 years of proclaiming his innocence in the killing of Savannah, Georgia officer Mark Macphail, Troy Davis was executed at 11:08pm. Within the last decade the attempts to spare Davis' life through the use of a highly energized social media campaign, field organizing and support by members of the media and celebrities, former US President Carter and former FBI director William Sessions were unsuccessful. Critics of Davis' original conviction and death sentence looked to the recantations of 7 of 9 key eye witnesses who's testimony were damning in the original trial. Unfortunately, the change of tune by key witnesses who placed the guilt away from Troy Davis and onto Sylvester "Redd" Coles (who was, "coincidentally", one of the Prosecution's witnesses and one of the witness who would not recant his testimony) could not save his life. Although Davis received three previous stays of execution, the US Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that there was no precedent to prevent the execution of someone who is convicted if they have received a fair trail.

But what is exactly a fair trial in the United States if you are young, black, poor and convicted of a  major offense? Many young Black and Latino men in the United States are routinely sentenced to long stays in prison or to death in numbers that are disproportionate to those of whites.  The social-economic factors of the United States such as race, poverty, the poor educational infrastructure that we place many men of color into where drugs warfare act as its incubator. Poverty as well as inadequate legal counsel have also presented challenges to "fairness" in the criminal justice system. In recent years, studies and DNA evidence have shown that many of those convicted have actually been innocent.

The Innocence Project has overturned the convictions of 273 men and women sentenced to death in the last twenty years alone. Many industrialized countries throughout the world have done away with Capital Punishment, yet the United States is leading the pack in the amount of men and women executed yearly.

Too many thoughts and feeling about this death of an potentially innocent man.