For The Life of Her Brother
By Ron Lajoie
AIUSA Staff Writer
Martina Davis-Correia has every right to be bitter; bitter
with her country, bitter with her neighbors, bitter with
her God. That she is not, says a lot about who she is and
how she was raised.
Martina and her brothers and sisters come from a good family,
one that always played by the rules. As a kid she watched
actress Sally Struthers on TV talk about "how just
a quarter a day could save a starving child in Africa."
She saved the quarters she earned from an after-school job
in a pizzeria and sent them in to the address on the screen.
Concerned about human rights, she joined Amnesty International
while still a teenager. Dutiful to her parents and her community
and proud of her country, she went into the army straight
out of high school, serving honorably in the First Gulf
War as an Army nurse. She planned to make army medicine
a career. "I wanted to help people," she says.
Then something went terribly wrong. An altercation in a
Burger King parking lot - a gun blast echoed into a Savannah,
Georgia August evening, an off duty police officer went
down in a pool of blood - and her brother Troy's life, Martina's
and her family's changed forever.
Who shot the cop August 19, 1989 remains a matter of dispute.
But Troy Davis had been in the parking lot that night and
he was the one fingered by witnesses and eventually convicted
of the crime. Martina firmly believes her younger brother
is innocent; a spectator in the wrong place at the wrong
time, and new evidence and testimony seems to back this
up. But Troy is on Georgia's death row now - and the clock
is ticking.
"I know Troy is innocent," she resolutely affirms.
"Me and my brother are really, really close, where
we can finish each others sentences and whether he was guilty
or not I would stand by him, but the fact that he's innocent
and in this position, it's like stabbing me in the chest.
"Troy was waiting to go into the Marine Corps. He had
transferred to night school where he completed his high
school education in order to take care of my sister who
was paralyzed from the neck down. So he worked during the
day and took care of my sister while my mom was working;
did her hair, catheterized her, because she couldn't do
anything for herself."
On June 25 the Supreme Court refused to hear Davis's case,
permitting his execution to proceed. Earlier a state court
had denied his habeas corpus petition - evidence of police
coercion - on a technicality, ruling that the petition was
"procedurally defaulted," that is, not raised
earlier. The Georgia Supreme Court and 11th Circuit Federal
Court of Appeals deferred to the state court and rejected
Davis' claims. With the Supreme Court refusal to hear his
case, Davis, now 38, is left without any judicial recourse;
his execution could come as early as July 17.
"We are pleased with the decision of the Supreme Court
today," stated Chatham County Chief Assistant District
Attorney David Lock, who helped prosecute the case. "The
claims of the defendant have been thoroughly reviewed in
the various courts. We feel the Supreme Court has rendered
a fair and impartial decision."
But doubt is certainly strong enough, Amnesty International
believes, that Troy Davis should be granted a new trial.
"The Supreme Court decision is proof-positive that
justice truly is blind - blind to coerced and recanted testimony,
blind to the lack of a murder weapon or physical evidence
and blind to the extremely dubious circumstances that led
to this man's conviction," rebutted AIUSA Executive
Director Larry Cox, the day of the Supreme Court's ruling.
"At times there are cases that are emblematic of the
dysfunctional application of justice in this country. By
refusing to review serious claims of innocence, the Supreme
Court has revealed catastrophic flaws in the U.S. death
penalty machine."
That Amnesty International would intervene in a death penalty
case, especially one where the merits of the state's conviction
are so dubious, is not surprising. Amnesty International
is, after all, an abolitionist organization. But there is
something personal in this intervention. Martina Davis,
who joined Amnesty International as a teenager while at
boot camp, is Amnesty International's State Death Penalty
Abolition Coordinator (SDPAC) for Georgia and Chair of AIUSA's
Program to Abolish the Death Penalty Steering Committee.
"I joined Amnesty when I was a teenager in the army
when I was in Colorado Springs, I think I was like 19 years
old," she recalls. "That was 1986. I joined Amnesty
never thinking that I'd be involved as far as death penalty
work or have my brother involved in a death penalty case.
I was in the library and I saw something about Amnesty International
and how they work with the UN to help people around the
world, so I signed up by mail."
In her SDPAC role she has certainly heard other death row
inmates make claims of innocence. She knows most probably
aren't. But the facts of her brother's case are certainly
compelling. Davis' conviction was not based on any physical
evidence. No weapon has ever been found. Seven of the nine
witnesses that had initially testified to Troy's guilt have
since retracted their testimony in sworn statements, some
claiming police coercion. Of the two that remain, one is
himself a prime suspect in the case.
A witness who signed a police statement declaring that Davis
was the assailant, later admitted, "I did not read
it because I cannot read." Another stated that the
police "were telling me that I was an accessory to
murder and that I would ... go to jail for a long time and
I would be lucky if I ever got out, especially because a
police officer got killed ... I was only 16 and was so scared
of going to jail."
Then there are the several witnesses who have in fact implicated
another man in the murder; Sylvester Coles, a local miscreant
known to the Davis family. According to one woman, "People
on the streets were talking about Sylvester Coles being
involved with killing the police officer, so one day I asked
him ... Sylvester told me that he did shoot the officer."
"Saturday morning Troy was walking the dog, washing
the car like he usually does. A person that just shot and
killed a police officer is not going to be doing that,"
Martina points out.
On Sunday he returned to Atlanta to work. It was Martina
who called him telling him he'd better come home after she
saw her brother's face on the TV over the lurid headline
"cop killer, wanted dead or alive" in the middle
of a dinner party she was having for friends. She was floored.
Troy returned to Savannah the next morning, turning himself
into the authorities, who nonetheless arranged for a full
media circus to celebrate their "capture" complete
with a perp-walk.
That was when the community, friends and neighbors, turned
on the family.
"They treated my mother like she raised my brother
to be a killer," she recalls. "Even the black
community. What hurt me more was the black community separated
themselves from us; the ministers, the people. Even the
president of the NAACP in Savannah, where my brother used
to hang out in his den all the time when we lived around
the corner, said it was a shame to have somebody like Troy
Davis live in our community. And this was right after my
brother was arrested. I mean he hadn't even gone to court."
The social ostracism continued during the trial. As the
defendant's family, they were kept out the courtroom until
the end of the trial, only then to beg for their son's and
brother's life.
"We weren't in the court, not when they said they found
him guilty," she remembers. "We were in the court
when they did the sentencing phase, my mom, my dad, my sister,
I don't think my little brother and little sister were there
because they were still fairly young. I didn't even realize
this until I really started working with death penalty families,
but the tactic is to keep the families out of the courtroom
so it doesn't look like this person has anybody to support
them. The courtroom was separated black and white.
The worst moment of Martina's life was when the judge delivered
the sentence.
"I felt like I was dead. I had this cold chill that
went through my body," she shudders. "They give
you the execution date in the next sentence and it was like
the next month. I didn't know anything about death penalty
procedures up until that point, except writing those letters
to people for Amnesty, and so I thought my brother would
be killed in less than 30 days. There was this one white
deputy, he came up to my family and he said, ‘I'm
going to clear this courtroom and let everybody out. But
what I want to do is I want to take ya'll back to the back
and let you go down through the tunnel.' So we went down
through the tunnel and out the building, because the newspaper
reporters were all out there and I think he could see the
pain in my mother's eyes."
There would be more pain, both emotional and physical for
the family. Martina's dad died within months of the verdict.
Martina would learn she was suffering from breast cancer.
She suspects it may have been caused by exposure to God
knows what in the First Gulf War. Through it all she has
continued her struggle for her brother, and though her work
with Amnesty, for all the abandoned men, guilty or not,
on Georgia's death row.
She has signed petitions, handed out postcards, talked to
lawyers, gone to the vigils outside the prison walls when
other inmates are put to death, (enduring the insults of
her fellow citizens who casually flip her the bird), traveled
to other states and other countries to talk about America's
peculiar institution. Always the altruistic one, she now
works to raise funds for breast cancer research too. For
her work with AI and other charitable organizations she
was named the United Way Volunteer Leader of the Year in
2004, given the Savannah State University Human Right Support
Award, Spirit of Excellence Unstoppable Woman 2006 Award
and various other community and civic honors.
She's done this while raising her son Antone, shielding
him from the harsh reality of his uncle's situation until
she thought he would be old enough to understand it. Thirteen
now, he comes along whenever she visits his "Uncle
Troy" in prison. They make little cardboard airplanes
together out of Reese's Peanut Butter Cup wrappers and fly
them around the death house.
Her continued faith in God and the rightness of her struggle
keeps her strong. She is angry yes, but she chooses to channel
it positively. She still loves her country, even though
she admits she hates how it sometimes behaves in the world
and some of the things it has done to her family and to
other "people that look like me."
"I've always been a strong person" she understates.
"I'm going to fight for my brother as long as I can.
I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here and seven of nine
of my brother's accusers have recanted, and you are just
going to say to hell with that, we're still going to kill
him. How is that right? How is that justice for the other
family?"
Right now Troy Davis' sole hope is getting the Georgia Board
of Pardons and Paroles to grant clemency. The Board could
decide to commute the sentence to either life, or life without
parole.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International activists all over the
world are in a full-court press, flooding the board with
urgent appeals to save Troy Davis' life. This is, after
all, one of our family. (So far Bishop Desmond Tutu, Rev.
Jesse Jackson Jr., Sr. Helen Prejean, singer Harry Belafonte
and actor Mike Farrell have written letters on Troy's behalf.)
"I am still truly optimistic, so many people are working
hard on his behalf and we expected the Supreme Court not
to rule," she acknowledges. "But the lawyers are
still working and activists from around the world are writing
and emailing and calling. Troy Anthony Davis is making a
statement about human rights and people are listening."
What this is doing to her mom is Martina's main concern.
"I think the worst thing for me in this situation is
my mother. My mother has not done anything to anybody, not
even a parking ticket. And she's walking around right now
going into barber shops to get postcards signed to try save
her child. Sometimes I walk into the garage and I hear her
saying her prayers. She's on her knees and she's crying
and she's begging God to please help my brother. And I can't
stand it."
