Reggie Clemons is Troy Davis

The case of Reggie Clemons represents everything that is wrong with the death penalty and the U.S. criminal justice system.


His case reminds us of Troy Davis, a black man who was executed by the state of Georgia in September, despite strong evidence of innocence, no physical evidence, another suspect and unreliable witnesses, not to mention worldwide protests.


In 1993, Clemons was sentenced to death in St. Louis, Missouri as an accomplice to the 1991 murder of Julie and Robin Kerry - two white women who plunged to their deaths off the Chain of Rocks Bridge into the Mississippi River. He was 19 at the time of the killings, with a clean record.


He was beaten by police, denied a lawyer, and coerced into making a false confession. As Amnesty International reported, there was no physical evidence linking Clemons to the murders. Even the prosecution admitted that Clemons did not murder the victims, nor did he plan the crime.


Two other young black men, Marlin Gray and Antonio Richardson, were sentenced to death along with Clemons. Gray was executed, and Richardson had his sentence reduced to life. Two sketchy eyewitnesses were essential to Clemons’ death conviction. Daniel Winfrey, a white co-defendant, pled guilty to a lesser offense in exchange for his testimony against the black defendants. Winfrey allegedly told a cellmate he would “say anything” to get a plea bargain, and “no one is going to believe a bunch of niggers.” He is now a free man on parole.


Meanwhile, Thomas Cummins, the victims’ cousin, originally confessed to killing the women, which he told police stemmed from an argument after he tried to have sex with Julie. Cummins also claimed he fell 90 feet off the bridge and swam to safety, which was unlikely given that he was dry and unscathed. Despite the inconsistencies in his statements, the charges against Cummins were dropped after he identified Clemons and the other suspects. Cummins received a $150,000 settlement in a police brutality suit.


Meanwhile, Clemons and Gray both claimed police brutality and coercion but were ignored. Clemons - who had been beaten by police and was ordered hospitalized by the judge at his arraignment - was coerced into confessing to rape. He did not confess to murder. And the audiotaped forced confession was admitted as evidence of his guilt.


This is where the problems for Reggie Clemons were only just beginning. To sum it up, he just couldn’t win, and the system seemed to conspire against him. His defense attorneys were unprepared for trial and neglectful, and the deck was stacked against him, as was the jury. The prosecutor, Assistant Circuit Attorney Nels Moss, who was disciplined by the court and had a pattern of misconduct, disproportionately excluded black prospective jurors, leaving a mostly white pro-death penalty jury in this heavily black city.


And then there was the rape kit and lab reports from one of the victims, buried in police headquarters for years, and never revealed at trial. One could reasonably assume that if that evidence had been helpful to his case, Moss would not have hidden it.


Police torture and false testimony, crooked prosecutors and a stacked jury, incompetent defense counsel and missing evidence. Let’s not forget raw racism. These are the key ingredients of a horrid dish called American justice. 


And sadly, this is why Reggie Clemons is facing execution. This is a prime example of what happens when criminal behavior in the police station and the courtroom sends an innocent man to his death. But unlike Troy Davis in Georgia, Cameron Todd Willingham, Ruben Cantu or Carlos DeLuna in Georgia, or Larry Griffin in Missouri, Reggie Clemons is still alive. There is still time to save him. We can fix this.


On the other hand, we cannot fix our system of capital punishment. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973, 140 innocent men and womenhave been freed from death row in 26 states, each spending an average of nearly 10 years in prison awaiting execution.

The Death Penalty as Ritualized Mob Violence

The execution of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia has outraged many, placing the gruesome and barbaric practice of capital punishment under the microscope.

A black man who at the least was apparently innocent— and at most definitely innocent— was executed despite serious questions about his case.  Most of all, there was ample evidence that Davis was not the man who killed Mark MacPhail, a white off-duty police officer in 1989.

When a white conservative audience cheered presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry over his execution record at a recent debate, it underscored what is wrong with the death penalty.

Even as 138 death row inmates have been exonerated since 1973, surely many innocent souls were executed.  But Perry asserted that he does not lose sleep over the notion that someone among the then-234 prisoners he put to death was innocent.

“No, sir. I’ve never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place of which — when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens, they get a fair hearing, they go through an appellate process, they go up to the Supreme Court of the United States, if that’s required,” said Perry.

The governor added, “But in the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you’re involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is, you will be executed.”

The shock value of Perry’s assurances that his death machine is thoughtful–the U.S. Supreme Court just stayed two Texas executions—was matched only by the bloodlust of the lynch mob that applauded him.  I say lynch mob because the death penalty, like the motives of a bloodthirsty mob seeking vengeance, was never about guilt or innocence.

Capital punishment is ritual mob violence, plain and simple.

No one claims that the death penalty deters crime, because it doesn’t, and there is no need to go there in any case.  There is no need for a cost-benefit analysis with a form of punishment so purely ritualized— up to the serving of the last meal to the condemned person, symbolizing that which he or she does not deserve.

And diehard supporters of capital punishment will focus on the need for justice and finality for the victims’ families.  Yet they will not entertain the role that race-, class- and politics-driven biases, not to mention outright incompetence and malfeasance, play in the administration of state-sponsored death.

Ancient peoples used the scapegoat as the personification of their hatred, fears and frustrations.  They sacrificed the scapegoat to transfer their sins and cleanse society.  In modern times, scapegoats have served a more rational role of preserving the status quo.

As the social psychologist Eliot Aronson has theorized, people in adverse situations may be inclined to lash out at the source of their problems, but may find it hard to retaliate against the direct cause of their frustrations.  So they lash out against those who are hated, visible and powerless.

Scapegoaters unite to eliminate the perceived cause of their problems, even the randomly selected perpetrator, as social thinker René Girard posits.  Even if there was an actual crime, the mob would not seek the actual perpetrator.  The actual perpetrator is probably a member of the community, and his elimination would bring retaliation.  Rather, a random scapegoat is targeted. Yet, the community will believe that the scapegoat is guilty, that she is actually responsible for the community’s problems.

And the ritual killing either will bring relief to the mob, or further fuel their anger.

Scapegoats are victims of a highly psychological process, but economics and politics are involved as well.  In America, blacks have served historically as the consummate racial scapegoat—blamed for failed policies, accused of committing crimes real or imagined, targeted for violence and their economically exploited.   Stereotypes justified the violence visited upon black people, and a regime of slavery and Jim Crow normalized the dehumanization of people of color.

It is no accident that prisoners of color, particularly blacks and Latinos, are disproportionately represented on death row, or that a vast majority of executions take place in a small number of Southern states where lynching and racial violence were commonplace.  And lynchings were public spectacles where tickets were sold, the spectators had picnics, and members of the crowd kept body parts of the victim as souvenirs.

In the early twentieth century, Southern states, fearing the passing of an anti-lynching statute by Congress, brought lynching into the justice system.  The courts assured the mob that black defendants would receive a quick guilty verdict, provided the mob allowed the system to do its part.

Indeed, the courts served as an effective venue for racial violence.  Between 1924 and 1972, when the Supreme Court found capital punishment unconstitutional, Georgia executed 337 blacks and only 75 whites.

One of those 337 was Lena Baker, the only woman to die in Georgia’s electric chair, known as “Old Sparky.”.  A black maid, her crime was being in an abusive and exploitative relationship with her employer Ernest B. Knight, a white man, who kept her as a slave, threatened her life, and locked her up for days at a time.  One day Baker fought back in an act of self- defense.  The two “tussled” over a pistol, which fired, killing Knight.  She was found guilty of murder by an all-white-male jury, in a trial that lasted less than a full day.  The jury came back after less than a half hour of deliberation.  Baker was pardoned posthumously in 2005, 60 years after her execution.

So the Troy Davis execution, like so many before him, was a lynching.  Remember that with ritualized killings, guilt or innocent is beside the point.  Someone must die, and anyone will do.