World Coalition Against the Death Penalty (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A protest against the execution of Troy Davis, Paris, July 2008.
The state of Georgia murdered Troy Anthony Davis by lethal injection on September 21, 2011. He had been convicted of killing a police officer and sentenced to death. At trial, numerous witnesses for the prosecution said Davis was guilty. Davis’s legal team appealed, citing recanted testimony from seven of the nine prosecution witnesses due to coercion by police. The pleading identified a different culprit altogether.
Scores of celebrities and activists, including Harry Belafonte, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, advocated for Davis’s life. Politicians from both sides of the aisle urged Georgia to reconsider based on the doubts surrounding the circumstances of the case. The NAACP, Amnesty International, and the Innocence Project also spoke up for Davis. One noticeably absent voice was that of then President Barack Obama.
The Davis case was a state matter, so Obama could not have pardoned Davis or offered clemency. Yet, as President—the first Black president—his voice carried weight. It was his responsibility to aid Davis, because an African American president has an obligation to name and fight against racial injustice wherever it breathes.
African Americans are disproportionately sentenced to death after being convicted of crimes. Some are guilty, some innocent. African Americans make up roughly 12 percent of Americans, yet 41 percent of all death row inmates. (The numbers are eerily similar to school discipline statistics for Black children, who are on the other end of the school-to-prison pipeline. But I digress.)
These statistics aren’t a result of an inherent degeneracy within Black people. They’re the result of institutions and systems that convict Black people and sentence them to death.
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, since 2011, dozens of men sentenced to death have been exonerated—most of them Black men wrongfully accused of murder. Innocent Black people are over seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than innocent white people.
As a result, innocent Black men continue to be wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. One recent example is Marcellus Williams, sentenced to death following his conviction of a 1998 murder.
In Williams’s case, one of a spate of recent executions, St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell acknowledged that his original prosecution “made constitutional errors that contributed to a faulty murder conviction.” This included the “mishandling of key physical evidence and the office’s use of witnesses who had personal and financial incentives to testify against Williams.”
None of this mattered. The state of Missouri put Williams to death on September 24, 2024.
The outrage over his execution was notable. It served to remind Black people that elections have consequences and that “sitting out” the 2016 presidential election led to the appointment of three conservative judges to the Supreme Court.
Vice President Kamala Harris held her tongue over Williams’s murder, just as Obama had done with Troy Davis thirteen years before. While she has no formal power to change the fate of an inmate on death row in any state, Harris, as a biracial woman who identifies as African American, has the same obligation as Obama did to name and fight against racial injustice wherever it breathes. She did not meet that obligation.
Sadly, abolishing the death penalty isn’t part of any Democratic platform. Neither is a concrete plan for addressing police brutality or racial injustice. Removing the filibuster could allow these issues to be addressed, but Harris has called for its elimination only with regard to abortion rights.
Black politicians can’t have it both ways: We can’t decry racial injustice while failing to act for fear of political and procedural overstepping. You cannot claim to stand on the shoulders of Fanny Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Martin Luther King Jr. without standing as they stood against state violence toward Black people.
Likewise, Black people cannot use the death of an innocent man at the hands of the state to justify voting for a politician or politicians who will prioritize the agenda of empire—genocide in Palestine, occupation in Haiti, and so on.
We have to come to terms with the fact that a vote for Harris doesn’t prevent the murders of people like Marcellus Williams, just as a vote for Obama didn’t prevent the murders of Michael Brown or Freddie Gray.
The matter of anti-Blackness is beyond the power of one Black politician to solve; to do that will take a movement. It will take a movement to stop the killing and make America great for once.