Tag: Death Penalty

Keynote Address at the Cornell International Affairs Conference VI

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Keynote Address at the Cornell International Affairs Conference VI, November 5, 2015

Good evening. Before I begin, I’d like to thank the Cornell International Affairs Society for giving the opportunity to speak to you all tonight, and for organizing this wonderful conference.

Tonight, I want to tell you a story. It begins when I was 15 years old, on September 3, 2008, in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. I received a phone call from a friend. He was an intern for Amnesty International, a human rights organization I had never heard of. He told me about this man on death row in Georgia named Troy Davis. Troy Davis was convicted in 1991 for the 1989 murder of a police officer in Savanah, Georgia. There was no gun, no DNA evidence. Instead, his conviction rested primarily on nine eyewitness testimonies. In the years that followed, seven of the nine eyewitnesses recanted their testimonies. Many of them said the police coerced or intimidated them into testifying against Troy Davis. Despite all this evidence that he may be innocent, Davis was going to be executed in just 20 days.

At the time, I didn’t think it was a big deal. I was a supporter of the death penalty, as most other people in Georgia are. Troy Davis couldn’t possibly be innocent—we had a justice system that protected the innocent and dispensed fair, just punishments to the guilty. If he were innocent, he wouldn’t have lost appeal after appeal.

But there was one small detail that stood out to me, one tiny thing that, in hindsight, changed my life forever. Davis was scheduled to be executed on September 23, while the Supreme Court was due to review his case on September 29. Why? He had been on death row for nearly two decades. Why couldn’t Georgia wait six more days for the highest court in the land to review his case? A fair justice system wouldn’t do that.

On September 23, 90 minutes before the scheduled execution, the US Supreme Court intervened and prevented Troy Davis from being executed. The next day, I sent him a letter. At his invitation, I visited him on death row five days later.

Before I went there, my idea of death row was Alcatraz blended with the gulag. I imagined death row to be dark and dank, filled with angry muscular men, killers and rapists who were destroyers of lives and families. They seemed more beast than human. They were monsters.

Before, everyone in here was just a mugshot and a name written in fine newsprint. But now, as I saw them talking and smiling and laughing and crying, no different than me, it was inescapable that they were . . . human. These were bodies and souls that had known loss and love, cruelty and kindness, pain and joy—beings that had known life. One inmate held his four-year-old daughter up with tears of joy. A boy my age was clad in a shirt with the words “Free My Dad” on the back. Troy told me about the background of many of the other death row inmates—how they had suffered from neglect, child abuse, and drug addiction. He told me about a man who was abandoned as a child. His mother was addicted to drugs, his father was nowhere to be found, and he slept in a dog kennel for shelter. That began the downward spiral that resulted in him on death row.
He told me his own story, about growing up as a quiet kid struggling to fit in, about seeing his hometown get taken over by drugs and gangs in the 1980s. He saw his friends start doing drugs, dealing drugs, or both. He told me his version of what happened the night of the shooting. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t shoot the police officer; he didn’t even have a gun that night. But once somebody else said he did it, the police didn’t consider any alternative suspects and the media started a witch hunt and convicted him in the court of public opinion. He turned himself in, because he thought he could tell the police his side of the story and they’d let him go. When he turned himself in, they hurled racial slurs at the black man who had taken one of their own. They tried to poison his food in the county jail when he was awaiting trial.

He told me he no longer celebrates his birthday, or Christmas, or New Year’s. Why bother, he told me, when it’s just another day you can’t be with the people you love? He said every time he sees his family it’s like they instantly age 20 years, because in his dreams and memories he always sees them as they were in 1989, when he was first locked up. In those 20 years, his father had died, his sister had been diagnosed with cancer, and the rest had aged, lost muscle, gained wrinkles. Every time they visited, he relived all of that. He said the first thing he was going to do when he was a free man was go to his mother’s house and sleep at the foot of her bed so that, when she woke up, she’d know this wasn’t a dream and that her son was finally home.

We grew close. The prison only allowed me to visit him every few months, but in between visits we wrote letters and talked on the phone. He began calling me his “adopted nephew” and signed his letters “Uncle Troy.”

While all of this was going on, Troy’s story attracted a lot of international attention, in part because of the growing international trend against capital punishment. The United Nations began angling for restricted use and eventual abolition of the death penalty in the 1960s. This has culminated in a series of successive resolutions since 2007 (the year Troy Davis first faced execution) that have imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, with the long term goal of its abolition. Year after year, the United States stands in the minority of countries voting against those resolutions, along with countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has openly stated that the death penalty has no place in the 21st century. The UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights specifically spoke out against Troy Davis’s execution.

The European Union, where the death penalty has been abolished, wrote directly to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to speak out against Troy Davis’s execution. The European Parliament passed a resolution calling for Troy Davis’s sentence to be commuted and for Georgia to grant him a retrial. Two Nobel Peace Prize winners spoke out against his execution. So did the Pope. All of these international institutions and figures didn’t speak out about Troy Davis because this was just a specific case of an innocent man slipping through the cracks. Rather, it was because his case was one of the most egregious examples of a system that was in itself a human rights violation.

That got me thinking, how do these human rights violations occur? What makes them possible? They occur when we successfully dehumanize the victims. And by only presenting mugshots and rap sheets, our society has dehumanized those on death row. I saw whole human beings as nothing more than the worst mistake they had ever made, as mugshots and rap sheets. And it was only by going to death row and building a personal connection with the people there was I able to break through that.

I think I would’ve eventually opposed capital punishment if I hadn’t met Troy Davis. There are plenty of practical reasons to oppose it. But I wouldn’t be here talking to you tonight. I wouldn’t have signed petitions. I wouldn’t have organized meetings. I wouldn’t have joined rallies. I wouldn’t have become a human rights activist. I wouldn’t have written a book. I wouldn’t have built the personal connection with many other people that convinced them to turn against the death penalty. I wouldn’t have a life’s mission like I do today, which is to fulfill Troy’s dream of a nation without any more Troy Davises.

My challenge to you is to find your Troy Davis. Find that personal connection to your work, whatever it is. If you’re a writer, go and talk to the people who read what you write. If you’re a programmer, meet the people who use your code. If you’re a teacher, truly understand your students. If you’re a fashion designer, meet those who wear your clothes. Find the people who are directly impacted by what you do.

Having proximity to your work changes you. It makes you believe that what you’re doing truly makes a difference, because you’ve seen it with your own eyes. It makes you understand that what you do actually has a real impact on other people. It’s so easy for us to get caught in the ivory tower, to write memos and join committees and make resolutions, without actually doing the hands-on work needed to see the actual, on-the-ground impact of our work. It’s like having a super power, because when you have that inspiration, when you have that motivation, you will always be better and more effective than the people who don’t.

In the end, by a margin of one vote, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles let Troy Davis be executed. But he wasn’t afraid to die. I talked to him, and he said, “God hasn’t failed me. He just isn’t ready for me to come home yet. Look at all the people I’ve inspired, people like you. Millions of people around the world know my name, and know I’m not the only one. If I die, I don’t want my supporters to fade away in sorrow. I want them to get angry and fight for other Troy Davises out there, and fight for human rights all round the world.”

Go out and find your Troy Davis. Gain your superpower. It may not be easy, but in such cases I always remember what Troy told me whenever I doubted myself: The only person who can stop you from doing something is you.

Thank you.

(Photo courtesy of the Cornell International Affairs Society)

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Remain Free Preview II: Death Row

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Death Row

This is a preview from Remain Free, which will be released on September 21, 2015.

 

The most direct route was to go down 400 and onto 75, slicing through the heart of Atlanta from top to bottom and following the interstate straight to Jackson. We instead took 285, circling the city and enveloping ourselves in the sprawling suburbs that ringed downtown until we merged back onto 75. It was about forty miles of monotony from there—stifled yawns, graffiti-covered buildings, and the occasional patch of pine trees until Exit 201. There wasn’t much to see in Jackson, population five thousand and county seat of the unfortunately named Butts County. The main road was deserted—just a trucker gas station and some empty parking lots. We drove until we saw a sign on the left: GEORGIA DIAGNOSTIC PRISON.

The road onto the prison campus was narrow but smooth. Tall pines lined the shoulders, which gave way to woods. A squat cottage—the warden’s, we were later told—nestled in a clearing against the woods amid lush, manicured grass. The cottage sat astride an idyllic lake where geese floated lazily by a wooden dock. Birds chirped, and I could feel the simple yet elegant beauty of it all.

But something felt off. Why was this here? This was an odd place to hold rapists and murderers. It was an even odder place to kill them.

The road ended in a two level parking lot. Behind it, a fence draped in barbed wire formed a rectangle that extended to the horizon, interrupted only by the emotionless vigilance of carefully placed watchtowers. Everything was white: the buildings, the prison vans, the watchtowers, even the helipad attached to the parking lot by a thin strip of concrete. Pranavi shuddered. My mother just stared ahead.

When I walk outside the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, I am free. When I go in, I am a criminal. My pockets are searched and emptied before I walk through a metal detector. Wallets, ID cards, and keys are confiscated, and our clothes are thoroughly checked to ensure minimal skin exposure. My hand is stamped so they know when I come and when I go. I am shepherded through a series of cramped cages where the door behind me closes before the one in front opens.

As I walk I feel the gaze of dozens of electronic and human eyes. Inspirational posters crowd the walls, ignored by those who work here and unseen by those who live here. I bound past an elevator for the handicapped, which hasn’t worked in months, and walk up a flight of stairs where a bulletin board lists my rights as a visitor.

The visitor’s lobby: On the left are two microwaves and a few vending machines, which will rapidly deplete the eighty quarters we bring in to replace Troy’s missed meal. On the right are two bathrooms. In the center is the main visitor area, where non-death row inmates sit with their visitors without the restrictions of bars or handcuffs. Their white jumpsuits read “Georgia Dept. of Corrections” on the back.

One inmate runs to his four-year-old daughter and picks her up with tears of joy. A boy my age is clad in a shirt with the words “Free My Dad” on the front. Beyond a glass wall and yellow bars, prisoners trundle along, occasionally followed by guards.

Welcome to Troy Davis’s home.

Troy Davis, inmate 657378, walks in now, bound in handcuffs. Two guards escort him to the visitation cell, a long, narrow room with concrete walls on three sides and reinforced glass and metal mesh on the fourth. We follow them in, and once Troy is inside they remove his handcuffs and walk out, locking the door behind them. He hugs each of us before we sit down. Then he begins his story.

Remain Free Preview I: Phone Call

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Phone Call

This is a preview from Remain Free, which will be released on September 21, 2015.

 

September 3, 2008.

I was watching TV when the phone call came.

“Hey, it’s Sahil. Do you have a second to talk?” Sahil was a childhood friend a few years older than me. While his parents and my mother had been friends for decades, he’d never called before. Why now? He lived too far away to see regularly, and we’d drifted apart over the years. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d seen him.

“Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Have you heard of Troy Davis?”

“I haven’t.”

“He’s an inmate on Georgia’s death row, convicted of killing a cop in Savannah. There’s a lot of evidence that he’s innocent. I’ve been working on the case at Amnesty International for a while, and I visited Troy on death row. He’ll be executed in a couple of weeks, so I’ve been calling everyone I know to get them involved before it’s too late.”

I handed the phone to my mother and drifted away from the call. Plenty of death row inmates preached their innocence to all who’d listen. Surely, after decades of trial and appeal, the man’s innocence would have come to light. If he could lose in court time and time again, he must have been guilty. Far more likely that Troy Davis was lying than to have a faulty trial and faulty appeals. I shrugged it off and retreated to the bedroom to stupefy my mind with television.

But the topic resurfaced on the ride home from school a few days later.

“Remember what Sahil was saying, about Troy Davis?” my mother asked. The car remained motionless in Alpharetta’s rush-hour traffic. Her voice was somber, carrying a heavy weight. “I’ve been researching the case online. There are serious problems. Sahil was right.”

A Google search revealed Troy Davis was a black man convicted in 1991 of the 1989 murder of a white Savannah police officer, Mark MacPhail. His conviction rested primarily on nine eyewitness testimonies. Seven of those nine had recanted or altered their testimony, citing police coercion and intimidation. There was no physical evidence, no gun, and no DNA. It all sounded convincing on the surface. But if the evidence were as strong as Davis supporters claimed, why hadn’t the courts ordered a new trial? The claims Davis made of mistaken identity, shoddy evidence, witness tampering, a rushed and sub-par investigation, and a systematic denial of appeals on technicalities implied a legal system so brazenly unjust that they had to be false. Even Georgia, with its troubled history of segregation, lynchings, and race riots, couldn’t be so perverse. Not in 2008.

As I read through articles, one fact stood out: Georgia set the execution for September 23, 2008, but the Supreme Court was reportedly due to examine the case on September 29.

Why? The state had intentionally set an execution date days before the highest court in the country was to review the case. Troy Davis had been on death row for nearly two decades. What difference would a few more weeks make?

These questions brewed in my mind at school the next day. If the Supreme Court was going to review the case just six days later, if Troy Davis had already been on death row for seventeen years, if Georgia was so confident the evidence against Troy Davis was ironclad enough to kill him, why couldn’t they wait? There was no logical explanation for the state’s actions. Except . . . except that they wanted to kill Troy Davis before others could examine his case. But why should they care if others examine his case? They would only care if there was a chance they were wrong.

Could he really be innocent? And could that really happen here, in America? The justice system was a seamless machine—impartial, unemotional, and unerring. The machine’s input was the accused. There were two streams of output: the innocent, quickly and efficiently released; and the guilty, made to meet the highest bar of innocence until proven guilty and swiftly given a punishment fitting of the crime. Why would the machine operate like this? I struggled through my disbelief and confusion but couldn’t find answers.

In school we were always told the self-congratulatory story of the American system of justice, infused with lessons from the struggle for independence from the United Kingdom. The flagrant British disregard for basic liberties convinced our founders to secure the right to a trial by jury, a doctrine of innocent until proven guilty, and a system of appeals—safeguards we were told helped make us the greatest and freest nation in the world. The lynchings and segregation and race riots here in Georgia were now just fading words in textbooks. Those kinds of things didn’t happen anymore. We’d moved past them as a nation. America today was the land of the free, and the American legal system the envy of the world. We didn’t execute innocent people.

Besides, if someone committed a truly heinous crime, if they raped and tortured and gleefully killed innocent people, they didn’t deserve to live. The death penalty was the product of an implied social contract, a contract murderers violated. In doing so they forfeited their right to life, and their execution was morally justified. Perhaps it was a strange way for a fifteen-year-old to think, but how else could I reconcile the senselessness of murder with my belief that we were governed by cold, unerring logic?

The state motto—Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation—now seemed more a hollow, mocking reminder of what we really were than a declaration of what we aspired to be. Did we live in a world where we killed people for the sake of finality and call it justice?

Remain Free

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Remain Free

I’m thrilled to officially announce the publication of Remain Free, a book I’ve spent three years working on. It will be released on September 21, 2015. More information (including excerpts from the book) can be found on www.remainfree.com, but I’ll answer a few commonly asked questions here. I answered other questions in a Reddit AMA I did when I first announced the book back in 2012.

Remain Free

What is Remain Free?

Remain Free is a memoir about my relationship with Troy Davis, a well-known death row inmate who was executed in 2011 despite serious doubts of his guilt. I believe he was executed innocent.

Why did you write this book?

Troy Davis was the focus of intense media scrutiny in the months leading up to his execution. In 2008, the Wikipedia page for “Troy Davis” was a football player, with a small link asking if you meant “Troy Anthony Davis,” the convicted cop killer whose sparsely populated page contained a few paragraphs. Now “Troy Davis” redirected to “Troy Davis Case,” which had pages and pages of material and over a hundred references. The case had been splattered all over the national news networks, debated by prominent talking heads every evening, covered by all major newspapers, and editorialized by popular political cartoons. Celebrities tweeted about Troy. An interview I gave spread over the internet and was republished in dozens of major newspapers. Troy Davis was no longer just a local case of interest. He was the most famous death row inmate in the world.

But after his execution, the media quickly moved on to other stories. The I Am Troy Davis movement had made him a household name, but had also created a caricature of who the man really was. Troy told me many things about the case that I couldn’t say publicly while he was still alive. Six months after Troy’s execution, I decided to write the book. I just want the world to truly know who Troy Davis was, what he stood for, and what really happened.

Why does Remain Free matter?

The issues in the American justice system discussed in Remain Free, like the morality, practicality, and constitutionality of the death penalty, racial tensions between police and black communities, overzealous prosecutors, police coercion and intimidation of witness—all of these issues are as relevant, if not even more relevant, today—think of Travon martin, Ferguson, Eric Garner, and the many other public incidents between police and African Americans.

Since Troy faced his first execution date in 2007, Seven states have abolished the death penalty in the last eight years. The Supreme Court recently considered the constitutionality of lethal injection. Since Troy’s execution, 16 death row inmates have been exonerated. What happened to Troy Davis from 1989 to 2011 is all too relevant in 2015.

And in my personal opinion, it’s a compelling story: the story of an unlikely friendship between a sheltered upper-middle class Indian-American teenager from the suburbs of Atlanta and a forty-year-old African-American death row inmate from drug-riddled Savannah—that’s not a story you hear about every day. The experience changed me forever, and I believe the story will open the minds of many people who’ve never thought about these issues.

When will it be released?

The book will officially be released on September 21, 2015, the four year anniversary of Troy’s execution.

What will you do with the money?

All of the profits from the book will be donated to the Innocence Project, a non-profit that exonerates wrongfully convicted individuals (including death row inmates) through DNA testing. They are the embodiment of Troy’s final request: that his supporters “continue to fight this fight.”

Two Years Ago

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This post was originally published on September 21, 2013 at www.remainfree.com.

Troy Davis was executed two years ago today.

I woke up shortly after sunrise. Today was gameday in Athens, Georgia, and as I hustled out of my apartment I saw families sprawled among dozens of red UGA tents, chatting excitedly and huddling around the television in anticipation of the big game. A few children were tossing a football back and forth, while a group of teenagers cackled as they played cornhole. There wasn’t time to join the festivities. I was already running late.

My mother flew in last night from Boston. Last year, it was just the two of us. This time we were joined by my father and my younger sister. It rained for the first hour of the drive, but occasional rays of sunshine poked through. As we passed Jackson, Georgia, I remembered the last time I was there, on this very day two years ago. The chants still resonated in my mind. I was transported back in time, an observer from the future watching as the hope and tragedy of that night unfolded.

We stopped at a rest area a little past the half way point.

It wasn’t too far from Dublin, Georgia. The last time I was there was in 2010, when the staff and interns of Amnesty International and I stopped there on our way to the historic Troy Davis evidentiary hearing. Today I was clad in the same blue “ I Am Troy Davis” t-shirt that I first wore in Savannah during the hearing. I was only sixteen years old then, a bit chubby and sporting long, shaggy hair. But what I saw in the courtroom furthered my conviction that Troy Davis should not be executed.

As we continued to drive the rain cleared, and the grayness gradually gave way to blue.

We drove past a few farms, but the cotton fields stood out the most. The other crops gave way to shoots of bright, billowy cotton, as if a snow storm had delicately placed bundles of flakes upon each plant.

As we neared the city, we crossed Clarence Thomas interchange. I thought back to the spring of 2012, when Justice Thomas and I sparred over the case. He had voted against giving Troy the evidentiary hearing. He held no doubts that justice had been done with Troy Davis’s execution. And yet, he was also the one who issued the reprieve on September 21, 2011, the one that delayed Troy’s execution for another four hours.

We passed Savannah’s city hall. The building was grand and elegant. But it wasn’t by the Savannah boardwalk or park-like squares that dotted downtown. It was out here, in the Savannah hinterlands, surrounded by overgrown forest and weeds and a half empty strip mall with signs for a Subway and World’s Most Famous Asian Cuisine.

Magnolia Memorial Gardens was exactly the way I remembered it last year. The front office was a small hut, large enough to fit maybe a dozen people.

Last year we rushed to arrive before the staff left, so they could show us where Troy’s grave was. This year, September 21 fell on a Saturday, and the whole place was deserted.

As I thought about the first time I walked here, when Troy was first buried, my mother had already walked far ahead to Troy’s grave.

The three graves were all there. Troy Davis.

Buried beneath him, his mother, Virginia Davis.

Buried beside them, Troy’s sister, Martina.

We placed a note and blue flowers (Troy’s favorite color) on the grave and remained there for a few minutes.

The only flowers on Martina’s grave were dead and wilted. The only ones on Troy and his mother’s grave were beginning to wilt and must have been there a few days.

My thoughts were similar to last year’s, so I won’t repeat them.

We began walking away from the graves. There was only one exit path.

As I walked, keys in hand, I noticed a police car nearby. It had been sitting there, watching us the whole time. As we left I heard the car start up and drive off into the distance.

We began the long drive back. Less than an hour into the drive, the rain began. It bombarded the car, angrily striking the windshield and blinding my view.The sun had set and the two lane interstate had no lights. One of the lanes was closed for construction so all of the cars were crammed into one narrow, bumpy lane. The car began hydroplaning, skidding and swerving every few seconds as I desperately tried to maintain control. Other drivers were tailgating me and each other, apparently oblivious to fact that one small mistake could send us all careening into each other at 70 miles per hour. I was sleep deprived and hungry, and my eyes were straining to see the road amid the whirlwind of mist, rain, and headlight glare. We had four hours left to drive, and the rain was not expected to let up anytime soon. It was too dangerous to pull over–a skidding car could slam into us on the shoulder.

This wasn’t just about me. My father sat beside me, advising me as I drove. My mother and younger sister were in the back seat, blissfully ignorant about how much danger we were in. My life and the lives of my family were in the hands of other people and other forces. No matter how carefully I drove, I wasn’t in full control. Was this how Troy and Martina and Virginia felt, as their lives were eaten away by imprisonment and cancer? I thought back to the cemetery, where the three Davises lay, their lives all snuffed out in 2011. Would the same fate befall my family in 2013? I couldn’t shake the thought.

There’s nothing like a cemetery to make you feel stupid. Yes, stupid. This week had been a rough week for me. At least, I thought it had been a rough week. I seriously injured my eye during a game of frisbee, caught a cold that caused me to miss several important classes and miss a week at the gym, and had a stressful situation with a close friend. But seeing so many graves dug for so many young people makes you realize how petty most of your worries really are. I felt stupid for being angry at such minor things.  At the risk of being cliche, l was reminded that life is short, and I wasn’t making the best use of the time that remained.

When Troy was alive, we would talk about how to live life. Troy noted just how unhappy people outside of prison were. He looked at me sadly and said, “People out there are living to die. I’m dying to live.”

When we made it home safely, I resolved to renew my commitment to live life to the fullest. Tell people how you feel. Help others. Be adventurous. Follow your dreams. Remain free.