New America Media, Commentary, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Posted: Sep 23, 2011

From the instant the Georgia Parole Board denied clemency to Troy Anthony Davis, the quiet murmurs grew to a crescendo in some quarters that President Obama should have stepped in to block the Davis execution. Filmmaker Michael Moore went even further and mused that Obama should make like President Eisenhower and take federal action to stop the execution. Moore was referring to Ike’s decision to send in the troops to quell racial rioting and enforce the federal court order of desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. Ike, of course, had the federal power and authority to take action precisely because it was a federal court order.

The Davis horror was a state matter, prosecuted by a local District Attorney, tried in state courts, and grotesquely settled by the state pardons and parole board. Obama had absolutely no legal power to intervene in the Davis case.

But that doesn’t answer the question of whether Obama had the moral obligation to express doubt about the pending execution. The heartbreaking answer is no. As much as we would have cheered the president if he had broken political protocol and weighed in on the Davis execution, it wasn’t going to happen.

To interfere in state issues would be to step into a political minefield that would do far more harm than good. It would violate the rigid separation of federal and state powers. It would open the floodgate for any individual that has a legal grievance to expect that the president speak out on their cause. While there were tens of thousands nationally and globally that rallied behind Davis, there were millions more who back capital punishment and rallied behind the Georgia prosecutors. Polls show that a narrow majority still back the death penalty, an attitude reflected in the cheers GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry got at the recent GOP presidential debate in New Hampshire for virtually boasting about Texas’ obscene record of trying and killing ‘em relatively quickly.

The death penalty is an issue that any sitting president faced with a tough reelection ahead would avoid like the plague.

A presidential statement on a controversial issue will polarize, and fuel political backlash. Sadly, this would have been the case if Obama had uttered a word about Davis. The Davis case was a near textbook example of the fury and passion that racial-leaden cases and issues always stir. Davis was African-American, and his alleged victim was white. Obama is African-American and there’s rarely been a moment during his tenure in the White House that he hasn’t been relentlessly reminded of that.

The one time that he did gingerly venture into the minefield of a racially charged local issue was his mild rebuke of the white officer who cuffed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in 2009. The reaction was instant and furious. Polls after his mild rebuke showed that a majority of whites condemned Obama for backing Gates and, even more ominously, expressed major doubts about his policies.

The president relearned a bitter lesson. If you speak out on an issue that involves race, police authority, and local law, you will pay a heavy political price for it.

Speaking out on a controversial racial issue, as the Davis case was, would have implied that the president was taking sides. President Obama has voiced support for reforms in the criminal justice system, especially in the area of sentencing, and has even expressed his personal qualms about some aspects of the death penalty. During the presidential campaign, he was clear: "I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes."

Now, in the wake of the Davis atrocity, with the horrific glare on the gaping racial and legal disparities and flaws in the death penalty and its application, the far better thing that Obama can do is to push ahead within federal law for reform and hold that up as a model for states to follow — to reform their death penalty procedures or, ideally, abolish the death penalty. That’s a reasonable expectation of the man who sits in the White House.

To break silence on Davis--as brutal and barbaric as the sentence and execution was—was simply not realistic.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
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