It’s not just the police. The entire justice system is broken.
I was 15 years old when I met Troy Davis, a Black death row inmate, in 2008. Troy was convicted of the 1989 killing of Mark MacPhail, a white off-duty police officer, in Savannah, Georgia. In the decades after his conviction, seven of the nine trial eyewitnesses—all of them Black—recanted their testimony. Their sworn affidavits painted a chilling picture of police coercion, harassment, and intimidation. In Savannah, which was once a purgatory for kidnapped Africans before they were sold into slavery, the case deepened simmering racial tensions. As Troy put it, “The police were rounding up Black men in Savannah, threatening them and demanding information on me.”
One trial witness, Darrell Collins, was only 16 years old when he was picked up by the police and interrogated with neither a lawyer nor his parents present. Collins initially denied seeing Troy as the shooter, but in his affidavit affirms, “After a couple of hours of the detectives yelling at me and threatening me, I finally broke down and told them what they wanted to hear…I am not proud for lying at Troy’s trial, but the police had me so messed up that I felt that’s all I could do or else I would go to jail”.
At a later hearing, Collins testified that the police threatened to charge him as an accessory to murder if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.
Another witness, Jeffrey Sapp, claimed the police harassed him and “made it clear that the only way they would leave me alone is if I told them what they wanted to hear… I didn’t want to have any more problems with the cops, so I testified against Troy.”
A third eyewitness, Dorothy Farrell, claimed the police “gave me the impression that I should say that Troy Davis was the one who shot the officer… I felt like I was just following the rest of the witnesses. I also felt like I had to cooperate with the officer because of my being on parole.”
We’ve learned that eyewitness testimony can be tampered with and mishandled like any other evidence, and the police investigation tainted the evidence in Troy’s case by violating multiple protocols used to keep eyewitness testimony reliable. The investigation did not use double-blind photo lineups, a protocol in which neither the officer administering the lineup nor the eyewitness know which photo is of the suspect. Police gathered all witnesses together to recreate the scene, ensuring their memories would merge. And they never investigated a primary alternative suspect who had a gun that night, nor did they ever even interview Troy himself. It became clear that once the police had a viable suspect, facts, witnesses and testimonials could be manipulated to arouse suspicion and railroad a target—often a young Black man—whose peers could easily be coerced with threats.
During our in-person visits on death row, Troy shared his own harrowing initial interactions with police. While he awaited trial, officers would come by his cell, yelling, “N—-r, if I had caught you in the street, I’d have blown your brains out!” If they saw him smile, they’d scream, “Why you smiling, n—-r boy?” Their hatred toward a man still presumed innocent ran so deep that, according to Troy, he had to be moved out of solitary confinement after there were multiple attempts by the police to poison his food. They regularly engaged in small actions of cruelty to make his life more miserable. He was frequently strip-searched and forced awake after midnight to shower.
No police officer involved in the Troy Davis case ever faced any consequences.
The ACLU calls the prosecutor the most powerful person in the courtroom. Spencer Lawton, the prosecutor in Troy’s case, has a checkered history of misconduct when it comes to high-profile cases. The Georgia Supreme Court overturned his conviction of Jim Williams, famously featured in the bestselling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, after it found Lawton had suppressed evidence from the defense. At Troy’s 2010 evidentiary hearing ordered by the Supreme Court, I watched with disgust as Lawton feigned forgetfulness over basic details of the case, accusations that he had instructed witnesses to “stick to their testimony” after they told him their police statements were inaccurate. Most bizarrely, he even claimed to not recall the op-ed he had written about the case just 20 months before the hearing.
Lawton’s most egregious behavior includes another conviction overturned when DNA testing exonerated the defendant, Douglas Echols, of a rape and kidnapping conviction. When Georgia’s legislature considered a bill to compensate Echols for the years he unjustly spent behind bars, Lawton wrote a defamatory letter to the legislators, falsely claiming Echols was still under indictment for rape and kidnapping. The letter ultimately killed the bill. The 11th Circuit condemned Lawton’s action as libel but opined that the doctrine of “qualified immunity” – the same that protects police officers who murder unarmed civilians—inoculates Lawton against any consequences. African-Americans, such as Echols and Davis, are more likely to be wrongfully convicted, and 15 states, including Georgia, do not have laws requiring compensation for the wrongfully convicted.
After his conviction in 1991, Troy told me, the judge declared “Mr. Davis, you will be executed by 20,000 volts of electricity until you are dead, dead, dead!” When I visited Troy on death row, he had two decades of stories to tell me—stories of guards shoving disabled prisoners against the wall and viciously beating them, making sure to wrap them in towels first so bruises don’t appear; others of guards leaving cells unlocked so inmates could attack others in their sleep, forcing inmates to take hallucinogenic drugs under the guise of mental illness and then raping them. It was the most terrifying manifestation of what permeated throughout the American criminal justice system: no matter how much psychological or physical violence they inflicted, no matter the severity of scars or the destructive wake of their cruelty, oppressors were unconditionally shielded from the consequences of their actions.
It was only with the pro bono assistance of a white-shoe law firm—a luxury few death row inmates will ever have—that Troy had any meaningful representation in the appeals process. After several appeals, his fate rested with the five-person Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. In a 3-2 vote, the Board voted against granting clemency. But the composition of the board raises questions.
Three of the five Board members included a District Attorney and officials from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Georgia Department of Corrections. The Board had no representation of public defenders, legal scholars, civil rights activists, or former judges—those who had witnessed and fought against courtroom injustices stemming from bias, discrimination, and corruption. Instead, a case highlighting wrongdoing by law enforcement would be decided by those who had climbed to the top of the law enforcement hierarchy.
In the end, despite jurors from the original trial openly doubting their guilty verdicts and despite calls for clemency from governmental bodies, Nobel Prize winners, a President, and over half a million petitioners, Troy Davis was executed on September 21, 2011. When I witnessed police dogpile and tase an unarmed black protester outside death row that night, it felt like we had come full circle. The chants then were the same as now—“No Justice, No Peace”. The signs from that night—“Not in My Name”, “Stop the Execution”, “Don’t Let the Blood Be on Your Hands”– could be recycled for today’s protests. Then, as now, the administration of justice protected those with power at the expense of the innocent.
Since Troy’s execution, 27 death row inmates – over half of them Black – have been exonerated – although exoneration and irrefutable evidence of innocence has not always been enough to clear their names. Five months and five days after Troy Davis was executed, Trayvon Martin was gunned down. The acquittal of his shooter sparked a movement and a refrain that is on the signs and lips of protesters all over the country today: Black Lives Matter. Troy spoke for them when he declared, shortly before his execution: “I’m not afraid of death—just more injustice in a broken system.”
If you’d like to learn more about my friendship with Troy Davis and the story of his case, see my book Remain Free. Thanks to Mitch Rice, Nishita Morris, Ajit Acharya, and Kavita Chhibber for reviewing drafts of this piece.