Troy Anthony Davis is finally free, but it’s not the freedom we were aiming for. He went before his time. He went during a time when black violence has finally drawn even with white violence, a time when black violence is finally closing the gap between itself and the black arrest rate. A time when black violence is growing quicker than the black population growth. The link between blacks and violence that many poor and blue collar whites have willed themselves over the decades to believe has finally become reality.

A Washington Post story which ran on 12/30/08 reveals “the percentage of black males aged 14 to 17 who killed someone rose by more than a third between 2000 and 2007, according to researchers at Northeastern University in Boston.” The article also summarized stats from ‘07 where black youths between 14 and 17 committed 1,142 homicides. Whites youths of the same age bracket committed 547 homicides the same year. Davis was almost 21 when he was charged, and yet his execution is wrong even if blacks commit most of the nation’s murders. For some strange reason this particular killing was different than many other questionable death row executions. The US Supreme Court and the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles acted as if they were afraid he was going to be proven innocent. In fact, enough contradictory testimony surfaced over the years since his ‘91 sentencing to at least warrant a retrial, but the thought occurs to me that we people of color here in the United States are traveling on the white man’s time-frame of social development, and this train is moving awfully slow - as if we had been kidnapped and taken for a slow ride in a technologically fast-moving world. And these are college-educated white men. Spooky. Only we, as black men, can determine how long we have to put up with this.

This most obvious question regarding Troy Davis’ 9/21 execution is, doesn’t this killing under the shadow of so many objections defeat the very purpose of death row? Indeed their dogged determination to snuff out Davis seemed like a dress rehearsal for something that is bigger than Davis’ exculpatory evidence. Many people missed the real message; you see, this wasn’t about Troy Davis or even Officer Mark MacPhail. When you have key people who trained for years and whose job it is to just listen to all the facts and then make a ruling, but by contrast they ignore actual contradictory evidence, they are training themselves, conditioning themselves to be mentally and judicially harder. They acted amidst the existence of these findings plus public outcry and pressure, regardless of who brought it to them, Pope, or statesman. What they are doing is actually rehearsing for Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners, present and future.

What cannot be dismissed is one directly unrelated factor; these old white boys in states like Georgia and Texas are enraged and feel pushed around by Obama (whether or not you feel Obama is doing the pushing or pushing hard enough is another issue). In other words, YES they KNOW Troy Davis is innocent; that goes for the Savannah Police Department, their area County Superior Court Judges, Thomas Wilson and Penny Freesemann, the Board of Pardons and Parole (BPP), the GA State Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court. A lot of people, present company included, called the BPP before the 9/19 clemency hearing and later on DA Larry Chisolm, after the BPP turned Davis down.

The immediate problem concerning district attorneys in these death penalty states, is that they are still conspicuously white as snow. The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), for example, counts only 22 African Americans and 22 Hispanics against a whopping 1,794 white DAs in Davis’ home state of Georgia. The aforementioned Chisolm is one of its scant number of black District Attorneys, the first African American DA in Chatham County and newly-elected. Like many black elected officials, blacks elected him, but they didn’t chose him; police and conservatives backed Chisolm from day one. Most black candidates are selected with as much scrutiny as black jurors during peremptory challenges before criminal trials. When you get bizarre decisions from black officials, it’s more than just coincidence; it was planned. Whites study deeply into every black prospect’s personal character, values or lack of them, and then he or she is sent out to us to vote for them. Chisolm is known to be pro-death penalty. The Longhorn State (Texas) comes up much shorter in black prosecutors with 0 (zero) as opposed to 11 Hispanic and 137 white. But sadly, things up north aren’t much better. In fact, many states are worse than GA. As Malcolm X once said “as long as you south of the Canadian border, you’re down south.”

One city has been on its own personal campaign to out-south the south when it comes to the execution of black convicts - Philadelphia, not Mississippi, but Pennsylvania. To black males, Philly DAs may as well come from Transylvania because their capital cases are the life-blood of that state’s provision of the death penalty, and it, along with their long tradition of police corruption, is sucking the blood out of the black community. Alabama, with its long storied history against blacks, has a 25% black population, but a 43% black death row population.

The mass-infusion of modern-day Italian / Irish immigrants has saturated the police precincts and justice system to the point where Philadelphia is flat-out the death penalty Twilight Zone. Blacks from the handcuffs to the prison chains are mostly there through the thought-pattern and race-monopoly game laid out for them years ago by the paranoid mind of a former illiterate high school dropout beat-cop named Frank Rizzo. It is this Rizzo-style of policing that has been imitated and duplicated throughout many police departments around the country, and it affects more than just cops. The ties between police, district attorneys and judges didn’t start with Rizzo, he just McDonaldized the criminal justice system. He also added another element, spying. COINTELPRO became established from ideas initiated by Rizzo and his associations with the FBI. Rizzo rose through the ranks until he became Police Commissioner, consolidating the Italian coppers while concurrently using his intense dislike and paranoia of the black militant groups of various times as motivation behind his surveillance and harassment ideas. This style of policing turns right and wrong almost upside-down for cops and rewards those who “play ball.” Racism and cover-up became normalized throughout the force and DA’s office. Rizzo eventually became Mayor.

Since then, Philly competes with southern states for the legal killing of black murder convicts: “Being a black defendant merits a score of 1.4 in predicting whether a death sentence will ultimately result. This extra burden for black defendants is comparable to such legitimate aggravating factors as torture or ‘causing great harm, fear, or pain,’ which scores of 1.9 and 1.0 respectively in predicting the sentence. Stated differently, in Philadelphia, the capital sentencing statue has operated as though being black was not merely a physical attribute, but as if it were one of the most important aggravating factors actually justifying the death penalty,” added the DPIC.

Some may have noticed the most obtuse reacting party during this whole Troy Davis affair was the US Supreme Court, Scalia’s Supreme Court. Understand, Chief Justice Antonin Scalia’s job, ever since his appointment by President Ronald Reagan in ’86, has been to de-sensitize the Supreme Court, especially away from the liberal stances often lead by Thurgood Marshall. That, and to become a pro-conservative judicial activist wearing a prominent banner of objectivity. Today he has devolved into a judicial Frankenstein, making erratic decisions and spewing even more erratic explanations for doing so. On the most important matters, those of life and death, these decisions are rarely challenged or critiqued. Many of us already know of Scalia’s proclamation during a hearing regarding Troy Davis back in ‘08, when he strongly implied that the high court is not obligated to change a verdict in a habeas court just because actual proof comes along at some point. Why? Because he feels the person in question has already had a full, healthy and fair trial. Why spoil it? Millions of dollars were spent to railroad you, how are those people going to feel?

On the morning of the 21st, Davis again appealed to the Supreme Court (a waste of time in my opinion, but that’s me). Although fully knowing that his execution time was set for 7pm EST, the SC announced that they would review his latest appeal one hour later. Evidently, the facility in which he was housed respected his wait for a response. The court came back and postponed his execution for about 3 more hours while deliberating, only to come back with a denial of his petition.

My question is, what in the hell were Scalia and Clarence Thomas (usually mum during these proceedings) and the others discussing during this deliberation? Why would they postpone the execution for such a short time, only to return with a rejection? Considering Scalia’s attitude that new findings shouldn’t deter a guilty verdict, he couldn’t have been interested in any discovery or revelations. Are they now getting some kind of thrill out of this? Were they just trying to tease Troy and his family? Ignore the white right when they give their overly-officious language about God and family values. When it comes to blacks, they want blood. One of the most damaging aspects about the murder of a police officer is the efforts to make the victim’s family really, really believe which black guy did it. Even under suspect evidence. The best example of this is with Abu-Jamal. The loss of a comrade does not produce any growth of common sense within the force, even over the course of time. Instead, they become even more strident toward the wrong direction. After that, when the Judicial System and the Prison Industrial Complex take over, the momentum takes on a life of it’s own, and it becomes a statement killing. Time spent waiting on death row for proof of innocence becomes just borrowed time.

According to the Atlantic Post “it is likely that the average American believes this is a rare occurrence worth the social value of the death penalty as a deterrent from violent crime. Unfortunately innocent people are often placed on death row. In a study of executions in 34 states between 1973-1995... an astonishing 82% of death row inmates did not deserve to receive the death penalty.” As I stated before, in this country, non-white races are simply riding on the white man’s time-frame of social development - a fine reward after black slave labor swiftly financed an economy built on land that’s not even his, and helped facilitate industry and technology.

Since much of the control over this social time-frame is undeserved, I am proposing a petition to be signed and turned into a bill that will abolish the death penalty in the United States; the Troy Davis Bill. For obvious reasons, the 34 remaining states that still support the death penalty will now have it wiped out. My reasons for this bill are based on four basic and urgent facts:

Already, other cases have been affected by the Troy Davis lynching. A nearby Albany GA judge recently stayed the execution of Ray Johnson, a white male charged in ‘94 with the rape and stabbing of Angela Sizemore. Johnson’s defense attorney is asking for more time, based on newly-enhanced DNA technology. “In light of the recent execution of Troy Davis under a culpable cloud of uncertainty of his guilt or innocence, I think that it is more than appropriate to take the opportunity now to resolve through new DNA testing methods some questions that could really shed light on whether Johnson is in fact guilty of this crime,” said Johnson’s Attorney, Brian Kammer. Kammer was one of Davis’ lawyers also. Judge Willie Lockette, an African American, granting a stay, and has yet to decide whether or not he will entertain a new DNA test.

I submit to you that the end of the death penalty means nothing more than the end of White America’s most expensive toys - capital cases and death row. Troy Davis spent his final few minutes having deadly chemicals injected into his body. Only one family was invited to watch the proceedings and it wasn’t his family. Davis’ final words of his innocence to the victim’s family was of little weight against a vicarious DNA picnic.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Chris Stevenson is a syndicated columnist, his articles also appear on his blog; the Buffalo Bullet. Follow him on Twitter(pointblank009) and Facebook (pointblank009). Click here to contact Mr. Stevenson.