May 17th, 2010
Headsman
This blog’s raison d’etre is not to carry a brief in the death penalty debate.
But whatever can be said of capital punishment in its modern American manifestation, the executioner mills into jagged, glass-sharp relief everything about crime and criminal justice, even about truth and redemption and matters even more fundamental to humanity than life and death.
The debate, however worn, is itself a part of the landscape of the death penalty Executed Today surveys, and like this site, it gravitates towards dates.
This week, we mark cases which have been marked by death penalty opponents: not necessarily because these cases are all themselves exemplars of infamous injustices, but because they cast into relief the humanity of the condemned, sitting paradoxically beside the humanity of those called upon to kill him.
As David Dow observed in his recent exploration of the personal toll exacted by Texas’s capital punishment regime, The Autobiography of an Execution,
[m]urder is perhaps the ugliest crime, which is why it is so shocking that most murderers are so ordinary in appearance. Average height, average weight, average everything. Even after all these years, some part of me expects people who commit monstrous deeds to look like monsters. I meet them, and they look like me.
There but for god …
On this day..
Entry Filed under: Themed Sets
May 17th, 2010
Headsman
On this date in 1995, Illinois executed Girvies Davis for murdering 89-year-old Charles Biebel in Belleville, Ill.
A small-time African-American hood reared in an alcoholic home, Davis was not linked to the murder by any physical evidence, or even any eyewitnesses. There was only one piece of evidence against him: his signed confession.
Unfortunately, the source lacked all credibility.
Davis copped to some 20 crimes under police interrogation. Officially, he did this when he voluntarily wrote out a list of evildoings and spontaneously passed it to a guard, which would be hard to believe even if the guy weren’t nearly illiterate. (Even the official story later became that Davis must have dictated the confession to someone else, like a cellmate.)
According to Davis’s later account, he signed statements the police had prepared for him … at gunpoint. The police logs say that he was taken out for a drive that night (“for evidence”), and conveniently confessed in the small hours of the morning.
Even though our man’s involvement in most of these “admitted” crimes (anything outstanding in the area that was still unsolved, it seems) was disproven, he couldn’t get traction in the courts once his conviction by an all-white jury was secured. Paradoxically, because there was no other evidence in the case to discredit, that “a-ha!” exoneration moment became all but impossible to secure despite the other holes in the case.
More action was had in the court of public opinion, where the usual suspects enlisted any number of pro-death penalty prosecutors and Republicans with serious misgivings about the case.
Time magazine lodged a naive early entrant in the “wait, wrongful confessions happen?” genre. The New York Times also covered the Davis clemency campaign:*
“The public sees the Bundys and the Gacys executed and they cheer,” said Gary V. Johnson, a former Kane County, Ill., prosecutor, who sought the death penalty in the past but opposes the execution of Mr. Davis. “The public doesn’t see the Girvies Davises.”
What savvy pols like Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar could see was that in the 1990s, all the political upside was in denying clemencies. So that’s what he did.
Years later, Davis’s last appellate attorney still believes “that the State of Illinois executed Girvies Davis for a crime I am sure he didn’t commit.”
Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess was also convinced of Girvies Davis’s innocence, and led a team of students researching the case back before he was famous for doing exactly that sort of thing. His work did not yield success on this occasion, but to judge by his account (pdf) of a last conversation he and his students had hours before Davis was put to death, it helped lead to the school’s later headline-grabbing wrongful conviction exposes.
Protess put [Davis] on the speakerphone, and the group gathered around. “Try not to mourn for me,” Davis said. “Move on with your lives. Just try to help people like me who get caught up in the system.” …
Davis had a final request: He wanted Protess and the students to promise that this wouldn’t be their last crusade in a capital case.
The room fell silent. “Of all the guys you know on the Row, who do you think most deserves help?” Protess asked.
“Buck Williams,” Davis answered without hesitation. “I’m certain he’s innocent.”
Protess … vowed that he and his next group of students would leave no stone unturned for Williams.
Protess was as good as his word.
In less than a year, Williams along with Verneal Jimerson, Willie Rainge and Kenneth Adams were free men after a generation in prison.** These men, known as the “Ford Heights Four”, would win the largest civil rights lawsuit payment in U.S. history for their wrongful imprisonment.
* Davis may also have been the first death-row prisoner in the U.S. with his own Internet site and online clemency petition, although these interesting artifcats have long since vanished into the digital oubliette. Gov. Edgar reportedly received 1,200 emails asking him to spare his prisoner’s life … testament even then to elected officials’ disregard for online advocacy.
** Williams and Jimerson were on death row; Rainge and Adams were serving life sentences.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,History,Illinois,Lethal Injection,Murder,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,USA,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1990s, 1995, charles biebel, david protess, dennis williams, ford heights four, gary johnson, girvies davis, kenneth adams, may 17, northwestern university, verneal jimerson, willie rainge, wrongful confessions
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