I felt a great deal of dismay as I read David Eder'sop-ed, "In defense of the state of Georgia," published on Wednesday in the Daily. I'm certainly not naive enough to think that all Tufts students share the progressive political outlook often ascribed to our university. And diverse points of view are essential to encouraging robust discourse on campus. I was very surprised, however, to see such a piece written by a peer, and I felt the need to respond.
First, Eder did not fully engage with the compelling evidence for the innocence of Troy Davis. Eder gave little credence to the fact that seven of the nine witnesses who testified that Davis was the shooter in the 1991 trial later recanted their testimony. According to signed affidavits available on Amnesty.org, all seven of these witnesses stated that they did not know with any certainty that Davis had been the shooter. Witnesses also claimed that they had been coerced by police officers into implicating Davis. Furthermore, nine witnesses signed affidavits stating that Sylvester "Redd" Coles, who was present on the night of the shooting and was the first to incriminate Davis, was in fact that shooter.
What truly happened on that night, more than 20 years ago, will probably never come to light. Some were there, and perhaps they know the truth of what happened. While Eder is bent on declaring the definitive guilt of Davis, I cannot speak with any authority on whether or not Davis is innocent. But it does seem to me that the "known facts of the case" do not sum up to certainty. The well-known credo states that the prosecution must prove the defendant's guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." Many around the world, including Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI, rightly voiced their own doubts, but these voices went tragically unheard. On Sept. 21, the State of Georgia put down a man, having failed to convince the world that he deserved to die.
I also had difficulty with the way that Eder described Davis' court proceedings. Eder stated, "In this country, we don't leave justice up to a judge or a bureaucrat. Rather, an impartial jury is selected by both sides." While it is impossible to quantify the degree to which Davis' racial and social positioning impacted the outcome of his trial, it is important to recognize that Troy Davis' struggle came to stand for a greater issue.
The uncomfortable truth, which many pundits and politicians are unwilling to acknowledge, is that social and political conditions still systematically disenfranchise minorities and the poor in America, nowhere more evidently than in the criminal justice system. In Georgia, African-Americans make up less than one-third of the population, yet they are incarcerated at a rate of nearly five times that of whites. While African-Americans make up on 14 percent of the U.S. population, they comprise 40 percent of prison inmates.
When Eder argues that Troy Davis got as fair a trial as any American, he is participating in the kind of "level-playing field" rhetoric that attempts to bury the unfortunate realities of race dynamics in the United States. Regardless of whether the specific circumstances of Davis' trial were shaped by larger social and structural inequalities, the message of the eventual outcome was loud and clear to many: The American criminal justice system had failed another black man.
What I find most dismaying about Eder's piece was his refusal to acknowledge the humanity of Davis. Eder stands in judgment of Davis and believes, based on his estimation of the "facts" of the case, that he is worthy to appraise Davis' character. Eder speaks of Davis as a man "with nothing but evil in [his] heart," which is beyond presumptuous. The ethics of the death penalty are too complex to engage in here, but the sort of blood retribution Eder championed in his piece seems to me to speak to a deep and problematic attitude among Americans. Like so many, Eder seems concerned with imposing a certain absolutist moralism on the behavior of others. Reading this article, I could not help but recall the Republican debate of a few weeks ago, in which the crowd loudly booed an openly gay soldier currently serving in Iraq and cheered the idea that the government would let an uninsured man die.
I was struck by the Christian resonance of Eder's phrase, "No matter what he could have done the rest of his life, it would have never atoned for this sin." This particular take on morality is based on eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth standards of vengeance. It seems to me that this approach misses the crux of Christianity, and for that matter, most major religions: compassion and forgiveness.
Please don't take me merely for a bleeding-heart or a hippie, because the concerns I raise are also pragmatic ones. Today's America is characterized both by widespread hardship and bitter political deadlock. If we cannot collectively begin to put aside the kind of hatred and anger that fuels statements like, "There are people in this world who deserve to die," if we cannot start to recognize our mutual humanity and move forward thinking not for ourselves but for one another, we as a nation are in deep trouble.
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Charles Laubacher is a senior majoring in English and American studies.
