The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (27 page)

Abu-Jamal has faced multiple obstacles as he has tried to have his voice heard. On August 12, 1999, as I was hosting
Democracy Now!
, Abu-Jamal called into our news hour mid-broadcast to be interviewed. As he began to speak, a prison guard yanked the phone out of the wall. Abu-Jamal called back a month later and recounted that “another guard appeared at the cell hollering at the top of his lungs, ‘This call is terminated!’ I immediately called to the sergeant standing by and looking on and said, ‘Sergeant, where did this order come from?’ He shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘I don’t know. We just got a call to cut you off.’” Abu-Jamal sued over the violation of his rights and won.

Despite his solitary confinement, Abu-Jamal has continued his work as a journalist. His weekly radio commentaries are broadcast from coast to coast. He is the author of six books. He was recently invited to present to a conference on racial imprisonment at Princeton University. He said (through a cell phone held up to a microphone): “Vast numbers of men, women, and juveniles . . . populate the prison industrial complex here in America. As many of you know, the U.S., with barely 5 percent of the world’s population, imprisons 25 percent of the world’s prisoners . . . the numbers of imprisoned blacks here rivals and exceeds South Africa’s hated apartheid system during its height.”

The United States clings to the death penalty, alone in the industrialized world. It stands with China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen as the world’s most frequent executioners. This week’s decision in Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case stands as one more clear reason why the death penalty should be abolished.

September 14, 2011

Troy Davis and the Politics of Death

Death brings cheers these days in America. In the most recent Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Florida, when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked, hypothetically, if a man who chose to carry no medical insurance, then was stricken with a grave illness, should be left to die, cheers of “Yeah!” filled the hall. When, in the prior debate, Gov. Rick Perry was asked about his enthusiastic use of the death penalty in Texas, the crowd erupted into sustained applause and cheers. The reaction from the audience prompted debate moderator Brian Williams of NBC News to follow up with the question, “What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause?”

That “dynamic” is why challenging the death sentence to be carried out against Troy Davis by the state of Georgia on September 21 is so important. Davis has been on Georgia’s death row for close to twenty years after being convicted of killing off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah. Since his conviction, seven of the nine nonpolice witnesses have recanted their testimony, alleging police coercion and intimidation in obtaining the testimony. There is no physical evidence linking Davis to the murder.

Last March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Davis should receive an evidentiary hearing, to make his case for innocence. Several witnesses have identified one of the remaining witnesses who has not recanted, Sylvester “Redd” Coles, as the shooter. U.S. District Judge William T. Moore Jr. refused, on a technicality, to allow the testimony of witnesses who claimed that, after Davis had been convicted, Coles admitted to shooting MacPhail. In his August court order, Moore summarized, “Mr. Davis is not innocent.”

One of the jurors, Brenda Forrest, disagrees. She told CNN in 2009, recalling the trial of Davis, “All of the witnesses—they were able to ID him as the person who actually did it.” Since the seven witnesses recanted, she says: “If I knew then what I know now, Troy Davis would not be on death row. The verdict would be not guilty.”

Troy Davis has three major strikes against him. First, he is an African-American man. Second, he was charged with killing a white police officer. And third, he is in Georgia.

More than a century ago, the legendary muckraking journalist Ida B. Wells risked her life when she began reporting on the epidemic of lynchings in the Deep South. She published
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases
in 1892 and followed up with
The Red Record
in 1895, detailing hundreds of lynchings. She wrote: “In Brooks County, Ga., Dec. 23, while this Christian country was preparing for Christmas celebration, seven Negroes were lynched in twenty-four hours because they refused, or were unable to tell the whereabouts of a colored man named Pike, who killed a white man . . . Georgia heads the list of lynching states.”

The planned execution of Davis will not be at the hands of an unruly mob, but in the sterile, fluorescently lit confines of Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Butts County, near the town of Jackson.

The state doesn’t intend to hang Troy Davis from a tree with a rope or a chain, to hang, as Billie Holiday sang, like a strange fruit: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” The state of Georgia, unless its Board of Pardons and Paroles intervenes, will administer a lethal dose of pentobarbital. Georgia is using this new execution drug because the federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized its supply of sodium thiopental last March, accusing the state of illegally importing the poison.

“This is our justice system at its very worst,” said Ben Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Amnesty International has called on the State Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute Davis’ sentence. “The Board stayed Davis’ execution in 2007, stating that capital punishment was not an option when doubts about guilt remained,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Since then two more execution dates have come and gone, and there is still little clarity, much less proof, that Davis committed any crime. Amnesty International respectfully asks the Board to commute Davis’ sentence to life and prevent Georgia from making a catastrophic mistake.”

But it’s not just the human rights groups the parole board should listen to. Pope Benedict XVI and Nobel Peace Prize laureates President Jimmy Carter and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others, also have called for clemency. Or the board can listen to mobs who cheer for death.

September 28, 2011

Troy Davis and the Machinery of Death

On September 21 at 7 p.m., Troy Anthony Davis was scheduled to die. I was reporting live from outside Georgia’s death row in Jackson, awaiting news about whether the Supreme Court would spare his life.

Davis was sentenced to death for the murder of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail in 1989. Seven of the nine nonpolice witnesses later recanted or changed their testimony, some alleging police intimidation for their original false statements. One who did not recant was the man who many have named as the actual killer. No physical evidence linked Davis to the shooting.

Davis, one of more than 3,200 prisoners on death row in the U.S., had faced three prior execution dates. With each one, global awareness grew. Amnesty International took up his case, as did the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Calls for clemency came from Pope Benedict XVI, former FBI Director William Sessions, and former Republican Georgia Congressman Bob Barr. The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles, in granting a stay of execution in 2007, wrote that it “will not allow an execution to proceed in this state unless . . . there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused.”

But it is just that doubt that has galvanized so much global outrage over this case. As we waited, the crowd swelled around the prison, with signs saying “Too Much Doubt” and “I Am Troy Davis.” Vigils were being held around the world, in places such as Iceland, England, France, and Germany. Earlier in the day, prison authorities handed us a thin press kit. At 3 p.m., it said, Davis would be given a “routine physical.”

Routine? Physical? At a local church down the road, Edward DuBose, the president of Georgia’s NAACP chapter, spoke, along with human rights leaders, clergy, and family members who had just left Davis. DuBose questioned the physical, “so that they could make sure he’s physically fit, so that they can strap him down, so that they could put the murder juice in his arm? Make no mistake: They call it an execution. We call it murder.”

Davis had turned down a special meal. The press kit described the standard fare Davis would be offered: “grilled cheeseburgers, oven-browned potatoes, baked beans, coleslaw, cookies and grape beverage.” It also listed the lethal cocktail that would follow: “Pentobarbital. Pancuronium bromide. Potassium chloride. Ativan (sedative).” The pentobarbital anesthetizes, the pancuronium bromide paralyzes, and the potassium chloride stops the heart. Davis refused the sedative, and the last supper.

By 7 p.m., the U.S. Supreme Court was reportedly reviewing Davis’ plea for a stay. The case was referred to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who hails from Pin Point, Georgia, a community founded by freed slaves that is near Savannah, where Davis had lived.

The chorus for clemency grew louder. Allen Ault, a former warden of Georgia’s death row prison who oversaw five executions there, sent a letter to Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, co-signed by five other retired wardens or directors of state prisons. They wrote: “While most of the prisoners whose executions we participated in accepted responsibility for the crimes for which they were punished, some of us have also executed prisoners who maintained their innocence until the end. It is those cases that are most haunting to an executioner.”

The Supreme Court denied the plea. Davis’ execution began at 10:53 p.m. A prison spokesperson delivered the news to the reporters outside: time of death, 11:08 p.m.

The eyewitnesses to the execution stepped out. According to an Associated Press reporter who was there, these were Troy Davis’ final words: “I’d like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I’m not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother. I am innocent. The incident that happened that night is not my fault. I did not have a gun. All I can ask . . . is that you look deeper into this case so that you really can finally see the truth. I ask my family and friends to continue to fight this fight. For those about to take my life, God have mercy on your souls. And may God bless your souls.”

The state of Georgia took Davis’ body to Atlanta for an autopsy, charging his family for the transportation. On Troy Davis’ death certificate, the cause of death is listed simply as “homicide.”

As I stood on the grounds of the prison, just after Troy Davis was executed, the Department of Corrections threatened to pull the plug on our broadcast. The show was over. I was reminded what Gandhi reportedly answered when asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”

WikiLeaks and the Crackdown on Dissent

May 31, 2012

WikiLeaks, War Crimes, and the Pinochet Principle

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s protracted effort to fight extradition to Sweden suffered a body blow this week. Britain’s Supreme Court upheld the arrest warrant, issued in December 2010. After the court announced its split 5–2 decision, the justices surprised many legal observers by granting Assange’s lawyers an opportunity to challenge their decision—the first such reconsideration since the high-profile British extradition case from more than a decade ago against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The decision came almost two years to the day after Pvt. Bradley Manning was arrested in Iraq for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks. The cases remind us that all too often whistle-blowers suffer, while war criminals walk.

Assange has not been charged with any crime, yet he has been under house arrest in England for close to two years, ever since a “European Arrest Warrant” was issued by Sweden (importantly, by a prosecutor, not by a judge). Hoping to question Assange, the prosecutor issued the warrant for suspicion of rape, unlawful coercion, and sexual molestation. Assange offered to meet the Swedish authorities in their embassy in London, or in Scotland Yard, but was refused.

Assange and his supporters allege that the warrant is part of an attempt by the U.S. government to imprison him, or even execute him, and to shut down WikiLeaks. In April 2010, WikiLeaks released a U.S. military video that it named “Collateral Murder,” with graphic video showing an Apache helicopter unit killing of at least twelve Iraqi civilians, including a Reuters cameraman and his driver. In July 2010, WikiLeaks released the Afghan War Logs, tens of thousands of secret U.S. military communications that laid out the official record of the violent occupation of Afghanistan, the scale of civilian deaths and likely war crimes. The Swedish arrest warrant followed just weeks later.

So many public figures have called for Assange’s assassination that a website was created to catalog the threats. Former Arkansas governor, presidential candidate and Fox News commentator Mike Huckabee said, “Anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.” Prominent conservative Bill Kristol said, “Why can’t we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are?”

Death threats from right-wing ideologues are one thing. The main concern with an extradition to Sweden is that Assange will then be extradited to the United States. In another prominent document release by WikiLeaks, called the Global Intelligence Files, a portion of up to 5 million emails were released from a private, global intelligence firm called Stratfor, based in Austin, Texas. The firm’s vice president for intelligence, Fred Burton, wrote in a January 26, 2011, email: “Not for Pub—We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.” If an indictment has been issued in secret, then Assange could find himself in U.S. custody shortly after landing in Sweden. He could be charged with espionage (the Obama administration has already invoked the law more than all previous U.S. administrations combined), and could be imprisoned for life or executed.