Adams: Life, death and errable executioners

Janus Adams is an author, historian and social commentator.

Troy Davis is dead. He was executed by the State of Georgia. Given a lethal injection and pronounced dead at 11:08 p.m. on Wednesday, he had been found guilty in 1991 of killing Mark McPhail. But was he?

That question has raised more than reasonable doubt. And that doubt should be more than cause for concern.

No forensic evidence linked Davis to the case. Seven of the nine eyewitnesses had recanted their testimony against him, citing police coercion.

In the telling of Davis' story, some have noted that Lawrence Russell Brewer was also executed Wednesday night, in Texas. He was convicted of the 1998 kidnapping and dragging murder of James Byrd, a brutal killing that ultimately led to new hate crime laws. Are we to equate the execution of a white man for the death of a black man with the execution of a black man for the death of a white man? Race is always there in the American discourse.

But, the Davis case is not just about race, it's about justice. In Brewer's case, there was plenty of evidence and little doubt of his guilt. There is only doubt about the morality of the death penalty. Indeed, after murders spanning the millennia, the notion that one more hanging, gassing, electrocution, beheading, stoning, dose of poison or lethal injection will be a deterrent begs rational thought.

In the case of Davis, who professed his innocence to the end, the doubt was so great that pleas for clemency came from hundreds of thousands of petitioners worldwide, including a former U.S. president, former director of the FBI, the pope, an Anglican archbishop, 51 members of Congress, and death-penalty supporters on both sides of the political aisle.

This same week, the national nonpartisan American Judicature Society released its study of eyewitness testimony in 850 photographic lineups. It found eyewitness testimony proved reliable only 27 percent of the time. Davis was convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony.

Had the State of Georgia and the U.S. Supreme Court heeded the evidence in his favor, after two decades on death row, Davis might someday have joined the ranks of 200 other inmates exonerated and released with the aid of a national public policy organization, The Innocence Project, on the basis of faulty eyewitness testimony.

Had justice -- not just its wheels -- been allowed to move forward, of the 273 people exonerated by the project's tiny band of dedicated investigators since 1992, Davis might also have joined the 80 wrongly convicted of murder.

He might have joined the 50 men released after serving terms of 22 to 35 years for crimes they did not commit.

Illinois' 31 errors in judgment made that state the 16th to abolish the death penalty. Georgia could have thought twice about its eight known wrongful convictions. Texas -- the leader of the pack with 475 executions since 1976 (four times that of Virginia, in second place) -- should rethink its infallibility after 43 exonerations.

Yet, at a presidential debate on Sept. 7, Texas Gov. Rick Perry was asked about his state's record. Under Perry, Texas "has executed 234 death row inmates," said moderator Brian Williams, "more than any other governor in modern times."

With that, the audience erupted in applause. Before Perry could utter a firm "No sir" to the suggestion that he might be troubled by the thought that some may have been innocent, his supporters cheered capital punishment.

We live in a time when our countrymen cheer death; where a death penalty proponent at the Texas execution of Brewer carries a sign reading: "Texas. We take out our trash."

Pity.

As a woman who suffered the murder of a bright young man I loved like a son, there is nothing one more death can do for me but make me grieve.