Last night, in the face of powerful reasons to doubt his guilt, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis. Since his initial conviction, seven of the nine witnesses have either changed or recanted their testimony. Some have said that they were coerced by police to testify against Davis. There’s reason to believe another man committed the murder for which Davis was convicted. Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions calling for a stay. Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, 51 members of Congress, Amnesty International, the Innocence Project, and even a former FBI Director asked for clemency. But late last night the United States Supreme Court unanimously denied a stay, and Troy Davis was put to death.
What a terribly crass moment to think of hawking books. So forget about that. Nobody here is trying to sell you anything today. But moments like this, when power acts in inexplicable and indefensible ways, are also when we most need the knowledge that books can give. The case of Troy Davis puts us in mind of three books we've recently published, a trio that together help us to understand how we’ve arrived at what feels so much like a miscarriage of justice.
The first is William J. Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, which is looking more and more like the book that many of us have been waiting for. Stuntz, a leading legal scholar who passed away earlier this year, wrote the book in an attempt to help bring this large, multi-faceted issue into focus. The historians, economists, sociologists, and law professors who study crime, criminal justice, and the surrounding politics have had too little to say to each other, he wrote. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice tells the larger story by making the connections so as to better understand why our criminal justice system tolerates so much crime and produces so little justice, especially for poor people and for African Americans. It’s a big, complicated web that Stuntz was uniquely positioned to unravel. The justice system is broken in large part because it’s no longer driven by law, Stuntz found, but instead by the discretion of officials who no longer accurately represent the localities they’re appointed to serve. Discretionary justice too often amounts to discriminatory justice, where police are free to make choices and bend rules and prosecutors are free to pursue cases like the one against Troy Davis. We’ll have more to say about this immensely important book in the months ahead.
From the collapse of law to the utter fallibility of the procedures meant to enforce it. Brandon L. Garrett’s Convicting the Innocent, a book we’ve been proud to see get its rightful attention since publication earlier this year, is a systematic study of what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. This week Garrett wrote a powerful commentary on the Troy Davis case, illustrating just how flawed his prosecution had been and calling it a “perfect storm of botched eyewitness-identification procedures.” He continued:
The eyewitness identifications in the Troy Davis case do not remotely pass muster based on what we know today about eyewitness memory—they were not double-blind, they were not conducted properly, and the staged re-enactment was blatantly suggestive. Nor is there any other indication that these witnesses were reliable… The Troy Davis case is a case about the death penalty and also about how much risk of error we as a society can tolerate. It is a case about judicial reluctance to meaningfully examine new evidence of innocence, including witness recantations. It is a case about jailhouse informants. But the Troy Davis case is finally a case about the fragility and malleability of eyewitness memory. And the eyes of the world are now on Georgia.
Finally, from collapsed law and fallible prosecution to the death penalty in the United States, the only Western nation to still practice capital punishment. While Stuntz and Garrett have written passionate books that make clear recommendations for improving our systems, David Garland’s Peculiar Institution is a cool, clear-eyed sociological look at what purpose the death penalty serves in America. His answer is that it’s largely a cultural function, not one of justice. He argues that the death penalty in America continues the long legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, southern lynching, and racial discrimination. He explained his book’s title in a post here last year:
The American death penalty is peculiar insofar as it is the only capital punishment system still in use in the West. It is peculiar insofar as the forms through which it is now enacted are ambivalent and poorly adapted to the stated purposes of criminal justice. And it is peculiar inasmuch as today’s capital punishment law and practice have been shaped, time and time again, by the nation’s history of racial violence and the legal struggle against it.
That analysis has been echoed over and over in discussion of the Troy Davis case.
The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Convicting the Innocent. Peculiar Institution. Strange how their very titles map the sad, sorry course of what this country did to Troy Davis last night.
