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Editor's update: Amy Goodman at Democracy Now reports that Troy Davis was executed at 11:08PM Eastern Time, after the the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stay the execution for Troy Davis about a half an hour earlier. #RIPTroyDavis was the top trending topic on Twitter following the announcement that the stay had been denied. Meanwhile, Lawrence Russell Brewer, a member of a white supremacist gang, was executed in Texas Wednesday night for the grisly and highly publicized dragging death of James Byrd, Jr., an African-American man from East Texas, in 1998. -- Julie
Troy Davis, a 42-year-old Black man, is scheduled to be executed at 7 p.m. EST Wednesday night for the 1989 killing of a Savannah, Georgia police officer. A last-ditch appeal for clemency was denied by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles Wednesday afternoon. But the amount of doubt surrounding his conviction -- including the recanting of several witnesses and reports that another person has confessed to the killing -- has outraged civil rights leaders, African American bloggers, and hip-hop stars.
Image Credit: Jim West/Zumapress.com
From BlogHer Nordette Adams at Whose Shoes Are These Anyways:
I think many people are shocked; they had believed that the American justice system would not execute a man under such circumstances, that it could be flexible when new information casts old testimony into shadows of doubt. What we're seeing today, as we saw not long ago in Texas, is that the system is broken in many places.
Cheryl Contee, editor of Jack and Jill Politics writes:
I was saddened to learn that Georgia has denied clemency to Troy Davis and plans to execute him despite active appeals from the public and around the world. At a minimum, the brother appears to deserve another trial based on the facts. What’s the haps?
Deborah Small of, also of Jack and Jill Politics appeals Davis' scheduled execution from a religious standpoint:
I don’t know the members of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles – very few people do. The identities of the people who the hold the ultimate power of life and death over Troy Davis and others sitting on Georgia’s death row are kept secret from the public, from the inmates and their families, from the people responsible for enforcing their decisions. So, I fully acknowledge that I don’t know who these people are but I would lay odds the majority of them consider themselves good, upright Christians doing the Lord’s work.
I wonder if they ever consider what Jesus would think and do in their position?
Arturo Garcia of Racialicious also writes a roundup of Internet reactions, and the hashtags #TroyDavis and #TooMuchDoubt are being used to tweet protests. There has been some accusation that Twitter is blocking those hashtags from trending, which the website denies in a report on ABC News:
Some users accused Twitter of blocking the topic from trending on Tuesday, though a representative from Twitter told ABC News there was no such action taken. The hashtags were trending today in cities around the US as well as Germany, the UK, Sweden, and France. Many Tweets called the case a symbol of a return to Jim Crow laws and racial inequalities in the justice system.
What are your thoughts about the Troy Davis case?
Race and Ethnicity Section Editor Grace Hwang Lynch blogs at HapaMama and A Year (Almost) Without Shopping.
