I Am Troy Davis

Jen Marlowe, Martina Davis-Correia, Troy Davis

• Verlag: Haymarket Books
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781608462957
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Criminology

"Those of us who know Troy Davis, who sat with him, who talked to him, know that he was somebody who was full of love, full of love for his family, full of love for humanity, full of love for a movement he was born into, a movement for civil and human rights in this country."—Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP

"Martina Correia's heroic fight to save her brother's life while battling for her own serves as a powerful testament for activists."—Liliana Segura, The Nation

In 1991 On September 21, 2011 Troy Anthony Davis was put to death by the State of Georgia. Davis’ execution was protested by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, and Pope Benedict XVI, President Jimmy Carter, and 51 members of Congress all appealed for clemency. How did one man capture the world’s imagination, and become the iconic face for the campaign to end the death penalty? I Am Troy Davis, coauthored by Jen Marlowe and Davis’ sister Martina, tells the intimate story of an ordinary man caught up in an inexorable tragedy. From his childhood in racially-charged Savannah; to the confused events that led to the 1989 shooting of a police officer; to Davis’ sudden arrest, conviction, and two-decade fight to prove his innocence; I Am Troy Davis takes us inside a broken legal system where life and death hangs in the balance. It is also an inspiring testament to the unbreakable bond of family, to the resilience of love, and that even when you reach the end of justice, voices from across the world will rise together in chorus and proclaim, "I am Troy Davis," I stand with you.

Jen Marlowe, a human rights activist, writer, and filmmaker, is the author of The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker and Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival.

Martina Davis-Correia was Amnesty USA's co-Death Penalty Abolition Coordinator for Georgia. Martina was also a leading advocate for women with breast cancer. She was twice named Savannah's "Unstoppable Woman."

Sister Helen Prejean wrote the internationally acclaimed book Dead Man Walking. She educates about the death penalty by lecturing, organizing, and writing.

Part One

June 29, 2007

The phone was ringing when Martina returned home from her chemotherapy treatment.

“Hello?”

“Hello. This is Global Tel Link with a collect call from Troy Davis at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.” Martina punched through all the buttons required in order to accept the call.

“Tina?”

She could hear something in his voice.

“What’s the matter?”

“I just got this paper that I have to fill out, and I need you to help me.”

“What is it?”

Warden William Terry had called Troy to his office. With his deputy present and surrounded by Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT) officers, the warden began reading. “The Court having sentenced Defendant, Troy Anthony Davis, on the 3rd day of September, 1991, to be executed by the Department of Corrections at such penal institution as may be designated by said Department . . .” The date, time, and method were all spelled out: July 17, 7 p.m., with a three-drug cocktail to first numb him, then paralyze him, then stop his heart. The warden had told him to sign the document, Troy told Martina, but he refused to sign his own death warrant, as if he agreed to those terms. Next, the counselor had entered and had given Troy a form. Troy then had thirty minutes to fill it out and return it.

“I have to decide who my final visitors will be. I have to tell them if I want my organs donated.”

If Troy elected to have his body returned to his family, he continued, it would have to go first to the state crime lab in Atlanta. His family would have to pay for an autopsy to determine the cause of his death.

“Cause of death?” Martina echoed, dumbfounded. After killing her brother, the state would require an autopsy to determine the cause of his death?

“If you all don’t want to pay to bring my body back to Savannah, they’ll bury me on the prison grounds in a pine box for $25. Those are our options.”

Martina could hear her brother’s words but could not quite grasp their meaning. She felt as if she were in the Twilight Zone.

“We’ll give them this information, Troy, but they’re not going to need it,” Martina finally said, jaw clenched.

They went through the questions one by one: Did he want to record any final words? Did he want a last meal? Troy’s voice cracked only once or twice as he and Martina drew up the list of the last twenty-four people who would see him alive. Cradling the landline receiver with Troy on it on one shoulder, Martina called friends and family members from her cell phone.

“Troy has an execution date for July 17,” she informed each stunned person. “Would you like to visit him on one of the two final days?”

She updated Troy on who could visit and on which day as he filled out the information on his form. As family was not permitted to be inside the execution chamber with him, his attorney, Jay Ewart, would witness the execution.

When Troy’s phone time was over, Martina hung up, allowed herself exactly five minutes to cry, and then sharply pulled herself together. She hoped nobody would ask her about the details of that thirty-minute phone call, planning with Troy his death and funeral. She did not think she would ever be able to repeat that conversation.

The walls in her house were thin. Martina could hear Mama in the next bedroom late that night, crying and praying. What possible comfort could she offer her mother? She lay awake in bed, listening to her mother’s desperate plea throughout the long, sleepless night: Please don’t let them kill my child. Please don’t let them kill my child.

§ § §

Virginia Roberts Davis, mother of Martina, Troy, Kimberly, Lester, and Ebony, was born on May 19, 1945, in a house on Myrtle Street in Savannah, Georgia, that her father, Screven Eugene Roberts, built himself.

When Virginia was twelve years old, her mother took sick with pneumonia and passed the following week. Screven, blind in one eye from an untreated steel-mill injury, did his best to care for his three daughters, but Mattie, the eldest, Annalee, the middle sister, and Virginia mostly had to fend for themselves. By the time Virginia reached high school, her father had lost sight in his second eye as well. Annalee contracted polio shortly after her mother died and gradually grew weaker. She finally passed on the sofa with her head in fourteen-year-old Virginia’s lap. Mattie got married soon after, leaving Virginia at home with her father, who remarried shortly after.

When Virginia finished high school, she found a job at a coffee shop next to the Chatham County Courthouse. A man named Joseph worked in the courthouse as a deputy sheriff and frequented the coffee shop regularly, chatting with Virginia. One day, Joseph casually asked Virginia where she lived. Next thing she knew, Joseph rode out to her house on his bicycle. He started coming by more often and, although Joseph was quite a bit older and had previously been married with children, Virginia was certain she was in love.

Virginia was eighteen years old when she married Joseph. Martina arrived after five years of marriage in the early hours of May 13, 1967. Mama, ecstatic, bought Martina all the things that a baby girl should have: a sweet little bassinet, a stroller, pretty clothes. But Martina was Daddy’s little girl from the start. Joseph took his infant daughter everywhere with him.

“Where have you been at with that baby?” Virginia demanded, hand on hip, when Joseph opened the front door late one night with little Martina tucked contentedly into the crook of his arm.

“We was down there to the pool hall, shooting pool,” Joseph answered.

“You took the baby to the pool hall? Who was holding her while you was shooting pool?”

“Oh, we had her sitting up on the pool table,” Joseph grinned as Virginia shook her head.

Troy was born less than seventeen months later on October 9, 1968. “Two peas in a pod,” Virginia said about her pair of little ones as she pushed them together in the stroller. Kimberly came along two years after Troy, providing Mama with two little girls to dress in frilly outfits with matching bonnets and Shirley Temple curls tight enough for Troy to pull them taut and watch them go boing back into place on their heads. Martina had no use for Shirley Temple. She wanted to play half-rubber and run with the boys.

Martina and Troy were always thick as thieves. “T & T,” they called themselves, Tina and Troy. Together they could accomplish any feat. They felt quite sure of this as they hatched an ambitious plot one Christmas Eve—they would catch Santa Claus in action. They lay in their beds that night, eyes screwed tightly shut as they feigned sleep until the murmur of Mama’s and Daddy’s voices subsided and the house fell still. Silently, making sure not to wake Kimberly, Martina crawled on her hands and knees out of the bedroom and met Troy on his hands and knees at their rendezvous point in the hallway, poking each other and stifling their giggles as they settled onto their pajama-clad bellies for their Santa Stakeout.

Martina sat up abruptly when she heard Mama and Daddy’s simultaneous cry of “Merry Christmas!” Rubbing sleep out of her eyes, Martina saw shiny bicycles and gleaming roller skates under the Christmas tree. She and Troy looked at each other in a mixture of excitement and incredulity. How was it possible they had both fallen asleep when they hadn’t been even a little bit tired? How had Santa managed to assemble the bikes without waking them?

“Come on, everyone, Christmas breakfast is ready,” Mama called as Martina, Troy, and Kimberly inspected their goods and Baby Lester joyfully scattered pieces of wrapping paper around the living room. Martina was too eager to play to be hungry, but she knew she had better get to the table right away. Mama always insisted that her family eat together, pray together, and make fellowship together. Virginia considered breakfast so crucial that, though she began work at Candler Hospital Food and Nutrition Services at 3 a.m. each morning, she took her break at 6 a.m. in order to dash home and prepare a hot breakfast for her children before school, just as Joseph was leaving the house for work.

Martina swallowed Mama’s eggs, bacon, pancakes, and biscuits as quickly as she could, eager to strap on her white skates with red wheels and to help Troy fasten his white and blue ones. Martina and Troy alternated all morning between precariously teetering on the sidewalk and squarely landing on their rumps. Martina, whose skating legs kicked in after lunch, spent the afternoon picking up Troy off the ground, while Daddy and Mama helped Kimberly and Lester ride on their new toy inchworms.

Martina and Troy were knit as tightly together at Butler Elementary School, where they were just one grade apart, as they were at home. If something happened to one, the other was right there to console. Frequently, they banded together to protect each other from Kimberly—the tattletale of the family. “Kim can’t hold ice water,” Martina would say scornfully. Martina and Troy’s little sister leaked whatever she was told.

Mama came home from running errands to find all four of her children on the couch, watching television.

“Have you done your homework?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Everything’s fine?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Kim lasted less than twenty seconds before blurting out what Martina and Troy had paid her a quarter not to reveal. “Mama! Tina broke a glass and Troy hid it in the trashcan!” Martina glared fiercely at Kimberly. Later, when the spankings were over and the incident was far behind them, Kim was going to get it.

The next day, Martina made a lovely cake in her Easy-Bake oven.

“Troy, you want some cake? Oooh, let me get you some extra icing, Troy.” She turned to preschool-aged Lester. “Here’s some for you, Lester.” She handed him a generous portion. “Your piece, Kim? Ooh, sorry, Kim, it’s all eaten up.”

Grudges between Martina, Troy, and Kim never lasted long, nor did fights between the Davis kids and the other kids in the Cloverdale neighborhood. If any of Virginia’s children scrapped with other kids on the block, Mama made them come to the chain-link fence surrounding the yard, apologize to one another, and hug.

“Come on, Mama, what kind of fight is that?” Martina protested, objecting especially strongly to the hug. But Virginia, known for being gentle yet strict, insisted, and peace reigned among the younger inhabitants of the predominantly black, working and middle-class Savannah subdivision. Cloverdale was only a few miles from some of Savannah’s most notorious projects, such as Yamacraw Village, and was not completely immune from the drugs and violence that plagued Yamacraw. But Cloverdale was the kind of neighborhood where parents knew that all the adults were looking after all the young ones, no matter whose they were. Even so, the Davis children knew that if they could not hear Daddy or Mama calling their name, it meant they were playing too far from home, and that they had better be inside the house—not en route or in the yard—by the time a streetlight so much as flickered.

Summers in Cloverdale brought a Bookmobile—and the Bookmobile led to a reading club. Martina, Troy, and Kim sat themselves in the driveway each summer Monday with their fresh stack of books and began reading. The other kids on their block did the same, everyone eager to be awarded the gold star for completing the greatest number of books. The summer book club was eventually replaced by Uptown, the teen dance club. Joseph had gone to great lengths to make sure his children knew how to dance, and teenaged Martina and Troy won every contest with ease. When breakdancing became all the rage, the dancing moved outside to the Cloverdale streets. A crowd of kids would gather round, watching Troy and the other Cloverdale breakers compete against b-boys from Liberty City. Cloverdale always won because Cloverdale could lay claim to Troy, and Troy could do the Worm.

“T & T” remained inseparable when Martina entered Windsor Forest High School, with Troy following a year later. “Are y’all twins?” people asked them regularly. Yet, although they were so close that they often completed each other’s sentences, their temperaments were starkly different. Martina took after feisty, argumentative Joseph. Troy, like Virginia, was the peacemaker.

§ § §

August 19, 1989

It was after 2 a.m. when Troy finally got home. He shook his head as he climbed into bed. He didn’t know the source of the gunshots he had heard as he was leaving the Greyhound bus station/Burger King parking lot, but whatever had gone down, it was messed up. Mama and Daddy had warned him about hanging out with the wrong crowd and spending time at places like the pool hall across from the bus station. Maybe it was time to start listening to them.

It seemed to Troy that his head had barely hit the pillow when Mama was knocking on the door and calling him to breakfast. He checked the clock. Just before ten. “Five more minutes, Mama,” he groaned, pulling the pillow over his face. Mama would have none of it. “You all get up!” she hollered, knocking more vehemently on his door and the girls’ door. After breakfast, Virginia asked Troy to do the dishes.

“Ma, that’s a girl’s job!” Troy protested. Mama raised her eyebrows. “That’s what your daddy fed to y’all, that men don’t wash dishes. Boys can wash dishes!” Troy pushed his plate away and stood up. “I’ll take the trash ou...