Northwestern students and professors from various organizations, including the Medill Innocence Project and Center for Wrongful Convictions, expressed outrage following the highly publicized execution of Georgia inmate Troy Davis Wednesday.
After a 22-year legal saga that included three stays of execution, countless appeals and despite requests for clemency signed by figures ranging from Pope Benedict XVI to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Davis was executed by lethal injection for the murder of police officer Mark MacPhail. In his final statement, Davis restated that he was innocent and asked for further investigation into his case, according to Associated Press reporter Greg Bluestein.
Davis’s case drew media attention in the months leading up to his execution, largely because, in addition to the missing murder weapon, seven of the nine prosecution witnesses that testified against Davis recanted or altered their original statements, often citing police coercion as swaying their testimonies.
Students and faculty with experience in dealing with wrongful convictions expressed widespread disapproval of the circumstances surrounding the Davis case. NU is home to one of the country’s most prominent innocence projects, the Medill Innocence Project, which has freed 12 wrongfully convicted men, five of whom were on death row.
“I was appalled when I found out,” former student and member of the Medill Innocence Project Monica Kim ’11 said. “I was sure something would come through at the last minute.”
David Protess, former director of the Medill Innocence Project and founder of the autonomous Chicago Innocence Project, said that both Davis’s race and the victim’s occupation were damaging to his case.
“Troy Davis had two major hurdles to overcome in order for his life to have been spared. And he could not do anything about either of them. The first thing is that he was black and the victim was white, and the other hurdle was that the victim was a police officer,” Protess said. “Because of those two factors, I don’t think any amount of evidence would have saved him,”
Protess also said MacPhail’s occupation as a police officer complicated the actions of law enforcement officials and prosecuting attorneys. He specifically pointed to several witness allegations of police misconduct, including violence.
“That kind of rage gets expressed when someone who you’ve known or worked with for a long time gets victimized,” Protess said. “It’s a fellow member of law enforcement that was slain.”
Other people on campus disagreed with the execution based on what they said was as a general lack of evidence.
“It seemed like the evidence against him became pretty weak as time progressed,” said Weinberg junior Josh Noah, president of NU College Democrats.
Prof. Robert Warden, the executive director of the Center for Wrongful Convictions at the NU School of Law, said he was most disturbed by the lack of evidence.
“To me, this execution is simply obscene,” he said. “When you’re talking about killing somebody, you should have more certainty than there was in this case.”
Warden also noted the importance of the seven witness recantations and their resultant failure to overturn Davis’s sentences, as well as the witness accusations of police coercion in obtaining testimonies.
“It’s basically impossible to prove (that you were coerced into a confession), but we’re giving the benefit of the doubt to the inculpatory theory when we should be giving it to the exculpatory theory,” said Warden.
Despite widespread misgivings about both the procedure and evidence presented in the trial, students and faculty said no one could be certain about whether Davis was guilty.
“I don’t want to give an opinion on whether he was innocent or guilty. It’s almost impossible to know without DNA evidence or anything like that,” Kim said.
Some students and professors said the case was a study in the implications of the death penalty and the accuracy of eyewitness accounts. Alec Klein, the current director of the Medill Innocence Project, said the case raised serious questions about the role of eyewitness identification in courtroom proceedings.
“When you have a murder case that hinges on eyewitness identification, you have to pay close attention as to whether those identifications are accurate and whether they hold up,” he said. “When someone stands up in a courtroom, points a finger and says, ‘He did it,’ that carries a lot of emotional weight.”
However, Klein insisted that he was not in an position to speculate about the case.
“The Medill Innocence Project is not an advocacy organization, so we don’t take sides on issues. We’re a journalism entity,” he said.
Students representing College Democrats and NU College Republicans offered contrasting opinions on the death penalty.
“The desire for revenge and killing those who commit the most heinous crimes in society is something that every human has,” Noah said. “But even though that’s what we feel at the most basic level, that’s not the right thing to do.”
Weinberg junior Ali Riegler, president of the College Republicans, held a different opinion.
“There’s an exhaustive appeals process in place, and the courts had their say, and the justice system had their say,” Riegler said. “In the end, they have more evidence in front of them than we do, and they’re the legal experts.”
