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Workers Vanguard No. 923 |
24 October 2008 |
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Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! Stop the Execution of Troy Davis! The grisly barbarism of the capitalist state is set to take the life of Troy Anthony Davis, a Georgia death row prisoner for the last 17 years. After the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Davis’ petition on October 14, a new death warrant was signed, and an execution date has been set for October 27. As a September 18 protest letter by the Partisan Defense Committee demanding Troy Davis’ freedom noted, “Like many poor and black prisoners on death row, Mr. Davis’ conviction was based on the testimony of ‘eyewitnesses’ who were forced by intimidating policemen to falsely implicate him in the death of a white off-duty police officer.” Seven of the prosecution’s key witnesses have recanted their testimony, with several saying they were coerced by the police to lie. There is no physical evidence tying Davis to the killing: no DNA, fingerprints or murder weapon.
Davis had petitioned the federal courts to intervene in his case after witnesses had recanted their testimony. But innocence does not matter to the capitalist state’s assassins. The federal judge wielded Democrat Bill Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act—which virtually eliminates the right of habeas corpus appeals for those sentenced to death in state courts—as grounds to refuse to hear the new evidence of Davis’ innocence.
The death penalty, supported by Democrat Barack Obama as well as Republican John McCain, stands at the pinnacle of the state’s arsenal of repression—an apparatus consisting of the army, cops, courts and prisons that protects the class rule, property and profits of the capitalist class. Rooted in black chattel slavery in the U.S., the death penalty is the lynch rope made legal. Black people make up over 40 percent of the death row population. We stand for the abolition of the death penalty everywhere on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and who dies.
The PDC—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—joins thousands throughout the world in outrage over the impending execution of Troy Davis. Stop the execution of Troy Davis! Free him now!
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