A few minutes before Troy Davis was scheduled to be poisoned to death in Jackson, Ga., on Sept. 24, I made the sign of the cross, took a deep breath and, with my friend Kurt, calmly stopped traffic and walked across the street into a phalanx of heavily armed police and SWAT officers at the gates of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. We were surrounded.
"I am here to stop the execution of Troy Davis," I said.
They screamed at me to leave.
At that moment, with a thousand people standing behind us watching and cheering, I knew things would never be the same in the movement to abolish the death penalty. There were too many new faces in the crowd.
"I am here to stop the execution of Troy Davis."
They screamed into my face and grabbed me.
"We are nonviolent. We are unarmed. We mean you no harm, officers."
We were handcuffed tightly behind our backs, and yelled at again. (Nearly two weeks later, I still cannot feel my left thumb from the heavy plastic ties left on for one hour.) We were placed in a police van with three young men, fellow protesters. Two more new friends, a father and son from a Georgia church, would join us.
We did not know Troy's fate until we were released in the morning. That same night Lawrence Brewer was executed in Texas.
Charged with disorderly conduct, we go to court on Nov. 17.
As nonviolent civil disobedience goes, ours was not terribly well organized. I had allowed myself to come to believe Troy would be alive today. Very few people knew any of us were undertaking this action. I thought only two others might "cross the line" with me. Having done this kind of thing more than two dozen times before, I was the only one among us with the cash needed to bail myself out.
That night I was sure that the most appropriate place for me to be was sharing a small cell with four other men, two of us having to lie on the floor at the Butts County Jail. One of the guards taunted and insulted some of my friends as if to provoke them into an angry reaction.
When I was arrested I did not know that one cellmate of mine, Shawn Deangelo, had been brutally attacked by police. That's him on the receiving end of the officer's grip and taser gun in this video. This is not the first time I have done civil disobedience when the only young black man among us is the one police single out and pounce on.
I spend my days trying to get clergy and laity involved to work to permanently abolish the death penalty. Thanks to Troy, my job just got easier. I believe grassroots organizing for social change is the most difficult and most important of the work on the spectrum of social activism -- more important than, and most needed above, nonviolent direct action on the one end of that spectrum and litigation and end-game lobbying in legislatures on the other, indispensable as it all is for something like ending the death penalty.
Still, it is essential for people of conscience to take risks and be willing to go to jail and be uncomfortable. I wish every American would experience jail for having committed civil disobedience. Dip your toes into the frigid waters of America's prison industry for a night and you'll feel the sea changes we need. Experiential learning.
Paltry as it was, I could not not take that action to stop the execution. I spent most of the past year asking religious leaders to speak out against Troy's killing. There is some darkness and silence to curse, religious leaders who are too timid, willfully ignorant and plain cowardly, but I am used to it and we move on. There are more and more clergy becoming engaged. As more people come to see the death penalty for what it is and what it does to us, there is much to celebrate in the struggle for abolition.
I grew up attending Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church in Potomac, Md. Every Sunday I sat through Mass staring at the huge, realistic-looking crucifix above the alter. That, my parents' deep concern for racial and social justice, and the post-Vatican II Catholic social teaching that I breathed in at school sealed in me a life-long sense of personal responsibility for violence and killing conducted supposedly on my behalf. At the lay-Catholic Mater Dei grammar school (motto: "Work hard, play hard, pray hard, but most of all, be a good guy") I was shown films on the Holocaust and vividly remember at age 10 feeling I must stand for life and love to keep anything like that from happening again.
During my senior year at the Jesuit-run Georgetown Prep, the oldest Catholic high school in America (mission, in short: "men for others"), the famous four American church women were murdered in El Salvador. A few days later John Lennon was assassinated. Nothing in my privileged life until then touched my conscience about violence and social injustice in the world more than those two events.
I have heard all the arguments for the death penalty backwards and forwards. Religious leaders of all kinds must come to reject the death penalty as now just a relic of the Old South -- racist, error-prone, expensive and brutalizing. It is cruel and unusual. There is nothing biblical about America's death penalty.
The death penalty is a sin. Jesus has nothing to do with the death penalty, and America's death penalty has nothing to do with the prophets of the Jewish Bible.
I believe that this decade is a kairos moment on the death penalty -- a special, opportune time the way the 1980s were in South Africa prior to the end of apartheid. Religious leaders have a choice: stand, speak and nourish this historic movement, or be irrelevant as the death penalty withers but more Troy Davises are condemned and executed. Clearly, more are choosing to speak.
I had been in Georgia the week before Troy's execution to deliver the letter organized by People of Faith Against the Death Penalty and Amnesty International and signed by more than 3,500 religious leaders from across the country and beyond. CNN and other media reported PFADP's finding that no such letter in modern history was thought to have nearly as many endorsements from religious leaders. More than 1 million people signed petitions for Troy.
We are winning. States have started to abolish the death penalty and more are close to doing so in the next two or three years.
In light of the massive mobilization that so many people helped bring about, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles did more than seal Troy's fate with their failure to grant clemency.
They triggered a new wave of the abolition movement.
They have challenged the consciences of clergy and laity to become involved in new ways. In recent days Christian theologians and ethicists across America have started collecting signatures on a public letter calling for abolition. A similar letter from Catholic theologians decrying the death penalty now has more than 300 signers so far.
Our movement will never be the same.
On Saturday I was an honorary pallbearer at Troy Davis' funeral in Savannah, Ga. Troy empowered millions of people and that is how I will remember him. He asked everyone to pledge to work to end the death penalty. I so pledge, and you can too.
Now that Troy has been laid to rest, let us take this sad moment and transform it from despair into hope and action.
Let us pledge to rise up and unbind our hearts, our souls, our country and our world from the death penalty.
You can sign People of Faith Against the Death Penalty's Pledge for Abolition at pfadp.org and forward it to your family, your friends, your colleagues, your pastoral leaders, your mayor and even your district attorney, police chief and sheriff.
Stand with me and say, "I am here to stop the execution of the next Troy Davis -- and every single person living on death row."
Stephen Dear has been executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, a national nonprofit organization based in Carrboro, N.C., since 1997.
Follow Stephen Dear on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SteveDear
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of cure. Once a person- especially a Black person- enters the criminal justice system, it will only be by the grace of God that he doesn't become the next Troy Davis. Stay out and live is the message.
There are truly savagely murderous people in this world who, after committing their heinous crimes, do not deserve to live. I hope you never have to experience the loss of a loved one to a cold blooded killer. Their is evil in this world, even if you choose to ignore it.
From what I've read over the years, this is common. Police hurt arrestees with handcuffs and ties with outrageously constricting ties, think they are the front line of punishment before cases are ever heard. There has to be public attention for this cute little practice, which is intentional and malicious. I remember one protester (from a few years ago) who complained about the cut-off circulation to a policeman. The policeman turned him around and made them even tighter.
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2011/10/04/officer-friendly/comment-page-1/#comment-68135
www.marchforabolition.org
God/Jesus: ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and ‘Whoever curses father or mother must certainly be put to death.’ Matthew 15:4
This is a New Testament command, which references several of the same commands from God, in the same circumstance, from the OT.
Jesus: Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.” The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply, “Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation? And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” (Jesus) replied to him, “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” Luke 23: 39-43
It is not the nature of our deaths, but the state of salvation at the time of death which is most important. This was the perfect opportunity for Jesus to say something against execution. He didn't.
Jesus: “So Pilate said to (Jesus), “Do you not speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you and I have power to crucify you?” Jesus answered (him), “You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above.” John 19:10-11
The power to execute comes directly from God.
contd
You are correct that there are people of good will that honestly believe that if a person kills another, and there is no doubt as to that person's actual guilt, that the death penalty is appropriate. While I disagree, I also understand.
But there are too many cases like Mr. Davis, where there is doubt as to his actual guilt, where it appears that there has been a miscarriage of justice (sometimes accidental, sometimes not) for a person of good will to support the death penalty as it is used now.
People point to those cases where someone is released from death row due to the diligent efforts of many people, including many volunteers, often with deliberate and systematic opposition from authorities, and somehow think that means that "the system worked".
The people that were found to be innocent and were released were simply lucky. Only death penalty supporters claim that every person executed was actually guilty, and considering how hard some of those supporters have worked to prevent continued investigation after an execution, only willful ignorance or deliberate dishonesty explains their position.
Yes, I am making the blatant statement that intelligent death penalty supporters are convinced that some innocent people are executed and are willing to publicly lie in order to either make political capital or because they simply have no respect for human life.