Georgia on my mind...

Thousands of people are killed every day in illegal and immoral wars, by famine, as a result of violence inflicted by family members and lovers, because of reckless acts like drink-driving and not bothering to buckle in the kids, in territorial fights exacerbated by poverty and deep fatigue.

Thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

So why should we all stop and pay attention when one man dies?

Tonight the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, a man who was found guilty of shooting an off-duty police officer by a jury who heard the eye witness accounts of nine people, seven of whom have since recanted their statements. Amnesty International, the NAACP, the Pope, Archbishop Desmond Tutu - with these people in your corner you would think justice would be carried out.

But this is Georgia, and this is the USA, and the problem with repeating the refrain that your nation is a beacon on a hill is that after a while you start to believe it. The problem with claiming to be the leader of the free world is that after a while you can no longer see the vast and complex restrictions on freedom which take place within your own national borders (as well, of course, as beyond them).

Much of the focus of the fight for justice in this case has focussed on Troy's innocence and the doubt introduced by the repeatedly tricky trial and criminal justice system. This is appropriate, but for me it is not enough. Even if Troy shot the cop, even if he was clearly guilty, he still should not have been killed. For me, the reason to abandon the death penalty is not to guard against the possible killing of innocent people but to guard against the loss of our collective humanity.

People keeping vigil across the street from the prison wore tshirts that read 'I am Troy Davis' and perhaps this suggested that if Davis could be killed for a murder he didn't definitely carry out, then any of us could be. This is the 'there but for the grace of God go I' approach; the 'speak out for him because I hope someone would speak out for me if I was in the same position' argument. And these are good and important claims to make. But there's another way we can recall that 'I am Troy Davis.' With his death, something is killed in all of us. Our collective humanity, the basic contract which underpins our ability to live together, is challenged when someone like this man dies. You and I may not be the people who put the needle into the veins, but we are part of the world in which it happened.

We are Troy Davis not because he is innocent but because he is human.

Troy Davis was executed tonight and who watched it happen? The execution was attended by the McPhail family whose relative Mark was shot in a Burger King parking lot in August 1989. Mark was off-duty and working as a security guard at the Burger King; Troy at the time was an unemployed black man in Georgia. This is a story of poverty and desperation from all angles, but killing someone else doesn't make it right.

I wonder what solace it was to the McPhail family to watch this black man die. Because of course this is about race. Of course this is about a black man being killed in America, and it's also about the Maori men who make up half the prison population despite us not making up even twenty percent of the NZ community. It's about the Indigenous Australian men killed in custody. It's about Aboriginal men being left by police to freeze in the snow in Canada. It's about the American Indian nations who used to live in Georgia before being marched across hundreds of miles to Oklahoma. We're all Troy Davis.

Troy was due to be executed at 7pm and when I turned on the TV to see if there was coverage of the vigils on US news channels I found that America was going about its business. Even BET (the Black channel in the US), which had a speaker on their live music video show to talk about the situation at 6.45pm, had ushered him off and returned to Beyonce by 7. As it turned out, the execution was further delayed when the US supreme court held things up at the last minute while it decided if it wanted to intervene. Which, in the end, it didn't. The death penalty was carried out by lethal injection at 11.07pm and at 11.08pm Troy Davis was pronounced dead.

I am Troy Davis. I am the thousands of people killed every day in illegal and immoral wars, by famine, as a result of violence inflicted by family members and lovers, because of reckless acts like drink-driving and not bothering to buckle in the kids, in territorial fights exacerbated by poverty and deep fatigue. We all are.




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The 'location' button on this blog will be set to Georgia tonite because, although I'm writing this on a humid Toronto night in my Spadina Ave apartment, my heart is down in Georgia.