To All:
I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced such emotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith. It is because of all of you that I am alive today, as Ilook at my sister Martina I am marveled by the love she has for me and of course I worry about her and her health, but as she tells me she is the eldest and she will not back down from this fight to save my life and prove to the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime.
As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.
I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.
So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.
I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing,
“I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!”
Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We will Win!
Leonard Pitts Jr.: In the need for death, Troy Davis' life hangs in balance
And they raised a cheer for death.
It was a chilling moment, but also a clarifying one in that it validated the grimmest suspicions about at least some of those who support capital punishment. That support, after all, is often framed in terms of high morality, the argument being that only in taking an offender's life can a society truly express its revulsion over certain heinous crimes.
But when the audience at a recent GOP presidential debate cheered the observation that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has overseen a record 234 executions, that fig leaf was swept away. You knew this was not about some profound question for philosophers and august men. No, this was downturned thumbs in a Roman arena, vengeance putting on airs of justice, the need to see someone die.
People dress that need up in rags of righteousness and ethicality, but occasionally, the disguise slips and it shows itself for what it is: the atavistic impulse of those for whom justice is synonymous with blood. If people really meant the arguments of high morality, you'd expect them to regard the death penalty with reverent sobriety. You would not expect them to cheer.
But that need to see death -- the inability to imagine how justice can be had without it -- is compelling. Indeed, there can be little doubt that is what is driving Troy Davis toward execution. He's scheduled to die on Wednesday, barring clemency from the state of Georgia. The state Board of Pardons and Paroles began taking testimony in his case Monday.
No conclusive forensic evidence ties him to the crime of which he was convicted, the 1989 killing of Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail. Of the nine witnesses who said they saw Davis shoot MacPhail, seven have since recanted, some saying police coerced them into lying. Of the two who have not recanted, one is a man identified by some witnesses as the real killer.
Yet on that dubious basis, Davis is scheduled to die.
It speaks to the power of that need, which was expressed with brutal candor by the dead officer's mother, Anneliese, in 2008 when Davis received a stay from the Supreme Court. "I'm furious, disgusted and disappointed," she said. "I want this over with." She said justice for her son requires death for Davis.
And that makes the letter recently sent by the family of another murder victim all the more remarkable.
James Anderson was killed in June near Jackson, Miss. He was a black man who was beaten and then run over with a pickup truck, allegedly by a group of white teenagers who, according to prosecutors, decided they wanted to go "eff with some N-words."
The killing was the definition of horrific. Yet in its letter, Anderson's family asks prosecutors not to seek the death penalty. It is against their faith, they wrote, adding that executing Anderson's killers will not "balance the scales," while sparing them may "spark a dialogue" that could help end capital punishment.
"Our loss will not be lessened by the state taking the life of another," they said.
That the family was able to find such charity of spirit in the depth of their own despair speaks well of them, yes. But it also proves there is nothing foreordained, nothing destined, about this equation of justice with blood. People can grow beyond that. A reverence for life can still trump a need for death.
Consider this column a lonely cheer for that.
LEONARD PITTS JR. is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132. Write to him at lpitts@miamiherald.com.
