I’ve had a lot of people ask me for my opinion on the Troy Davis execution because of my personal experience with this topic, so here we are.
In March of 1990 in Ringgold, Georgia, Shani’s father called her mother on the phone, asked her to come to the house (they were divorced) and proceeded to murder her in cold blood-The Definition of Murder 1. He was granted bail for the entire year leading up to the trial where he didn’t even receive a life sentence, although he died in prison 19 years later.
Yes, he received bail! Shani’s grandfather slept with a shotgun beside his bed until he was jailed. He was a white male in the deep South. This was still Ringgold, GA in 1990, around the time where Troy Davis was found guilty and sentenced to death.
In June 0f 2009, Shani was murdered by her son Zeke-an 18 year old, white, freckle faced young man. The state will not even approach the death penalty as they said with no priors and the “nature of the crime,” (it was his mother) they feel that they wouldn’t get it and that the court would show mercy because of his age, although this is a clear cut case of Murder 1 as well.
To be clear, I am against the death penalty-I’ve always thought that a life behind bars would be worse than death and that it was not our place to determine when someone else should die, regardless of the crime, once they were in custody.
We murdered Troy Davis. Whether he committed the crime or not, there is so much doubt and secrecy surrounding the case, at the very least he should have had his sentence commuted to life in prison. We are blood thirsty. We are racist. We are ignorant. We would rather see someone pay for the crime than seek the truth. This is our collective consciousness and we need to take a long, hard look in the mirror as people. There is no healing to be had here. All we did was kill another person with hate and anger in our own hearts, and we’re not even sure that he did it.
This is who we are Georgia, and Wednesday night left me deeply saddened to be a resident of this state. It's time to change.
There you go.
Peace.
