New America Media, News Analysis, Peter Schurmann, Posted: Sep 22, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO -- At 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon the Ferry Building’s clock tower rung in San Francisco, a somber note under a blue sky as men and women joined hands in a silent circle to pray for the life of Troy Anthony Davis. Above, tourists hooted and hollered as they sped along a zip line running the length of Justin Herman Plaza, their laughter coming in mocking tones to those below.

The 42-year-old Davis was executed on the night of Sept. 21 in Georgia’s Diagnostic and Classification Prison, outside Jackson, for the 1989 murder of police officer Mark MacPhail. This was the fourth and final time that Davis, whose lawyers had exhausted appeals, had approached the death chamber, a fact one British reporter equated with “torture.”

But how many of us care?

When it comes to the death penalty, studies show that 34 percent of Americans would still support the system even if it meant the death of innocents. Jeffery Toobin told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that as it stands, support for capital punishment in general hovers right around 60 percent.

“They don’t give a damn… no respect for human lives, especially that of a black man,” said Kiilu Nyasha, a former member of the Black Panthers and long-time community activist who was at the San Francisco rally last night. “It’s a legal lynching,” she added.

Beside her stood Sister Mary Virginia Leach of the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose, in Freemont, Calif. “Our congregation has taken a corporate stand against the death penalty,” she said, noting that Davis’ case highlighted the flaws within the system.

Mid-way through the vigil, participants were called on to share their reasons for being there. Kendon Smith of San Francisco, a tall African American in glasses and a goatee, took the microphone and addressed the crowd.

“I’m not going to talk of patriotism,” said Smith, pointing to an altar behind him where an American flag had just been taken down. “But it’s important to keep in mind that Davis is an American, and he is being devoured by the American government.” Smith ended by saying for that reason, the flag should go back.

It didn’t.

Two minutes after four (7:02 Georgia time), shouts of joy erupted from the crowd, which was not large but intimate, emotional. Word had come that Davis had been given a stay – or a temporary reprieve. No one knew for sure.

It was later revealed that the Supreme Court had agreed to revisit the case, if briefly, deciding in the end that there was not enough evidence to warrant the court’s intervention.

Sara Schmidt, regional coordinator for Amnesty International, which organized the vigil in San Francisco as part of a global day of action in protest against the planned killing, read aloud in a tearful voice the words spoken not days earlier by Davis.

Blue was his favorite shade, she began, adding that he’d expressed a desire to have a room painted in that color. “I’d like to go fishing with the bamboo pole my friend made, fly in an airplane and listen to music. I’d like to get married and become a father… to watch the sunrise and sunset.”

Davis died at 11:08 from a lethal dose of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride.

Stacy Suh is a sophomore majoring in political science and English at UC Berkeley. The native of South Korea and a longtime volunteer with Amnesty International addressed the crowd shortly after four, when hope still hovered, saying she’d been involved with Davis’ case since high school.

“People believed with Obama’s election that we’d entered into a post-racial society,” she later said. “But the death penalty proves that we haven’t.”

Toobin, a former federal prosecutor, noted on CNN after Davis’ execution that despite the prevalent notion that blacks are disproportionately handed the death penalty, statistics in fact show that the determining factor in capital punishment cases is not the color of the suspect, but rather that of the victim. When a black man kills a white person, he said, death is the most likely verdict.

“Obama wants the United States to come across as a beacon of democracy for its role in freeing Libya,” said Julien Ball, a member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and a participant in Wednesday’s vigil. “Meanwhile….” he said, his voice trailing off as he contemplated the pending execution.

Davis’ death may prove a tipping point in the discourse surrounding the death penalty. Schmidt with Amnesty said the group had received “tens of millions of tweets from people who had never taken a stand on the issue of capital punishment before.”

Miriam Gerace of SAFE California, a campaign seeking to end the death penalty in the state, said the execution represented a “tragic opportunity” to turn the tide.

Noting that California would spend an additional $95 million a year on death row cases if it tried to "improve" the process, and over $1 billion in expenditures already forecast over the next five years, she said it was a “waste of funds” in a state where "46 percent of murders and 56 percent of rapes go unsolved." SAFE, she says, hopes to “channel these funds toward better police work.”

According to a press release, the group plans to introduce an initiative for the 2012 elections that would replace the death penalty with life imprisonment with no possibility of parole.

Nyasha, the former Black Panther, said that Davis would not be in the situation he was in were it not for the 1996 passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which she said had been retroactively extended to cases dating back to 1990.

Citing Time magazine, a report in the Huffington Post notes that the act -- signed into law by then President Bill Clinton shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing -- sped up sentencing in capital punishment cases by “restricting a federal court's ability to judge whether a state court had correctly interpreted the U.S. Constitution." Davis’ supporters say the law proved a major obstacle to his being granted a new hearing.

“As long as there were no clear violations of federal law during the proceedings,” Nyasha said, “the question of presumed innocence became irrelevant.”

If innocence has become irrelevant, then so too has justice.