When the State of Georgia killed Troy Davis last week, it demonstrated to the world that there are some aspects of American life that never left the state of barbarism.

One might be justified in singling out the individual states that have killed the most people over the past few decades, when many states have either outright banned the use of such punishment or have allowed the death penalty to wither away, in a de facto abolition of the death penalty.

That would be dodging our responsibility as a nation.  While states like Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and Virginia might be the leaders in the use of state-sanctioned killing, in a real sense, all Americans are responsible for the use of the practice, which is a popular form of punishment in such places as China, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, North Korea, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and Iran.

According to Amnesty International, 137 countries have abolished the death penalty.  Of course, the U.S. is not one of them.  That puts this country in the company of nations that oppress their people. 

The Campaign to End the Death Penalty, a nationwide organization, puts its opposition succinctly.  They list five reasons for ending legal state killing:  The death penalty is racist, the death penalty punishes the poor, the death penalty condemns the innocent to die, the death penalty is not a deterrent to violent crime, and the death penalty is “cruel and unusual punishment.”

There are numerous organizations in the country that have fought to end the use of the death penalty.  Whether it is because of the continuing work of these groups or the realization by the American people that it is a deeply flawed system, the number of persons convicted of murder and other serious crimes who have been sentenced to death has been dropping in the past several years.  The number of death sentences handed down in the nation as a whole has dropped considerably over the past two decades.  It was reported to be 315 death sentences in 1995, 128 so sentenced in 2005, and 102 sentenced to die in 2006. 

Only 13 states had abolished the death penalty by 2007, in addition to the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.  In the rest of America’s jurisdictions, the law often is applied arbitrarily and people of questionable ability to understand either the charges against them or the finality of their death sentence are killed in the context of law. 

A 32-year study by M. Watt Espy Jr. and John Ortiz Smykla of America’s death penalty record, from 1608 to 2002, indicates how skewed the numbers are when it comes to who are in jail or prison and the unevenly applied instances over the centuries in America of the death penalty.

Here is the racial breakdown of their study of those who have been sentenced to death, since 1608:  Asian, 1 percent; black, 50.5 percent; Hispanic, 2.5 percent; Native American, 2.5 percent, and white, 43.5 percent.   As many other studies have shown, America’s prisons are full of people of color, mostly African-Americans.  The Innocence Project, which has been freeing prisoners for two decades through the use of DNA testing and comparisons, has seen to the release of 273 persons, 17 of whom served time on death row.  And the races of those exonerated were:  166 African-Americans, 81 Caucasians, 20 Latinos, 2 Asian-Americans, and four whose race was unknown.

That a relatively small group with limited funds could go up against the power and money of the prosecutorial system in 50 states and win indicates that there are untold numbers of people behind bars who also are innocent.  Tampering with evidence, forced confessions, provision of inadequate or incompetent defense representation, the reliance on false witnesses, and many other acts against justice for the accused all result in prisons containing many who have been wrongly convicted.

That’s why the execution of Troy Davis last week was such a miscarriage of justice.  Now, though, the decision of the state to kill him is irrevocable.  There were so many questions raised about the prosecution of his case by thousands who believed him to be innocent of the charge of murder.  Much of the evidence was circumstantial (there was no gun found) and witnesses at trial later said that they had been coerced by the police to give testimony against him.  Seven of nine witnesses recanted their testimony and there is suspicion that one of the remaining witnesses had actually committed the crime.

There will never be a chance for The Innocence Project or anyone else to save Troy Davis’ live by proving him innocent.  He could be proven innocent, but nothing that is done will bring him back.  That is what proponents of abolition of the death penalty have said for decades, that, if an innocent person is killed by the state, there is no way to right that wrong.

The family of Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer, said what families often say in such cases.  They said they wanted closure, but vengeance is not closure.  Not a family member apparently ever considered that Georgia might be killing an innocent man.  They said they wanted peace, but peace cannot be obtained through the killing of yet another human being.  They said they wanted the Davis family to understand and feel what they have gone through for the past 20 years, but the MacPhails can’t ever know what it is like to have a son and brother on death row, believing every day that he is innocent and, ultimately, standing helplessly by as the state executes.

People must be proven guilty “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” to get a conviction.  That’s the law.  In the process of appeals, Troy Davis was told to prove his innocence, which is not how the system of justice works.  But, even with the doubts that came to light and the cracks that appeared in the legal case, no one would give Troy Davis the chance at another trial, with witnesses who would tell the truth.  There might have been a chance (might still be a chance) to prove that someone else killed Mark MacPhail.  Even if that does happen, it won’t make much difference to Troy Davis or his family.

In all of this, the press played a considerable part.  In stories about Troy Davis, the press frequently interviewed the bereaved family and the thing that the reader or viewer would take away from the appearances was that Troy Davis was guilty and they just wanted the whole thing to be over, meaning that he should be executed and be done with it.  Even the slain officer’s son, who was only a few months old at the time of his father’s murder, was absolutely certain that Troy Davis was the murderer and should be executed.  There was no doubt of his guilt in the minds of the MacFail family.  The press, or media, allowed the family to have what was to have been the final decision on Davis’ death:  He should be killed without any further delay and no amount of doubt about the circumstances of his conviction or the potential injustice of the case should be considered.

For readers and viewers, that was the character of the case as presented by the media.  Yes, there were thousands, in this country and around the world, who were asking that Troy Davis be spared, because of the apparent flaws in the prosecution’s case against him.  In fact, one prosecutor was quoted as having said that he would not now try the Davis case as a capital crime, but nothing was said or done to try to keep him from the death chamber by officials who might have felt that way.

As it becomes more and more clear that the death penalty is unevenly applied in America, with people of color paying the greatest price in a system that is often unjust, the general population has become more against the use of such an extreme and barbaric method of punishment.  Even so, there are nearly three dozen states, which still have the death penalty on the books, even though they may use it less frequently.  In Illinois, under a Republican governor, George Ryan, a moratorium on use of the death penalty was enacted years ago and, earlier this year, the state abolished the death penalty, commuting to life sentences the 15 inmates who remained on death row.  The reasons cited included the legal system itself and the way capital punishment was applied, in a state, which had one of the biggest populations on death row.

About four years ago, three newspapers, two of them influential among the nation’s papers, called for abolition of the death penalty, the Chicago Tribune, the Sentinel in Pennsylvania, and the Dallas Morning News.  The Tribune, for example, had supported the death penalty since 1869, but the examination of the law by reporters at the paper resulted in stories about the uneven, unfair, and unjust application of the penalty and the paper responded accordingly. 

Progress is being made against the death penalty in America, but it is slow, too slow for people like Troy Davis.  Use of capital punishment can be supported only by people who care nothing about the real possibility (even, the likelihood) that innocent men and women will be executed.  Slowly, through groups like The Innocence Project, Americans are coming to the realization that the injustice in the system is inherent and that a modern society cannot tolerate a system that inevitably kills the innocent.

President Jimmy Carter, one of many prominent world figures who urged Georgia’s pardons board to block the execution, was quoted by the Associated Press about the Troy Davis execution:  "If one of our fellow citizens can be executed with so much doubt surrounding his guilt, then the death penalty system in our country is unjust and outdated." said Carter. 

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.