At 11:08 pm, at the exact minute that Troy Davis died, Troy’s sister Martina Correia looks toward the prison while Amnesty’s Laura Moye collects the contact info of a young student who wants to get more involved. © Scott Langley

On this day one year ago, Georgia killed Troy Davis.  Join with us today to remember Troy Davis and how he and his story impacted you.  Scroll down to the comments section and share your experience.

At dinner yesterday, a friend from the NAACP passionately recounted to me and Kim Davis how she felt on September 21, 2011.  I thought about the power of collective memory and the enormous well of energy it represents.  The execution of Troy Davis was deeply personal to countless people.  Whether they were outside death row in Georgia, at the Supreme Court in Washington, marching in Harlem, gathered outside the US embassy in London or glued to the media coverage, countless people have recounted to me where they were and what they felt that night.

From the prison grounds in Jackson, Georgia, where I was that night, I remember various feelings including adrenal rushes and fatigue from our tireless campaign to prevent what was about to happen.  I also remember my anger.  How could this state that I had lived in for 16 years see neither a moral nor pragmatic reason to take death off the table for Troy?

Despite our herculean efforts, we had not broken through.  Adding insult to injury, I could not believe the unprecedented show of force.  An army of armored and armed men lined the highway near our gathering point.  A helicopter flew overhead and squad cars made occasional runs up and down the highway, sirens blasting.  On some level, though, this meant that we had effectively demonstrated our movement’s power since our cell phones and posters were hardly a fair match against riffles.

Execution day: At 6:30 pm, a protester is arrested as police and SWAT teams push back a surging crowd across from the prison grounds. © Scott Langley

As we approached 11:08pm, the time we later learned was when Troy’s life ended, we gathered around the dignified Davis family.  By that point, the Supreme Court issued its denial of a last ditch appeal.  We all knew what was coming next and we could only wait for the official announcement that the homicide had been carried out.

Martina modeled for us what to do.  She wasn’t crying.  She wasn’t shouting.  She was organizing, even from her wheelchair on the grassy grounds at death row.  She never stopped organizing people in the struggle to help her brother and to end the death penalty.  She introduced me to a law student from California who was going to school in North Carolina.  This woman had driven a great distance to stand in solidarity with the family that day and to protest Troy’s scheduled execution.  Martina wanted to make sure the young woman got connected to our network and could get involved in the work.

Keep up the fight

Troy asked us to “keep up the fight” and Martina showed us what that looked like.  There are so many things you can do to honor them.

1. Tell us how Troy impacted you below and join us by redoubling our resolve to end the death penalty.
2. Demand an investigation of the Troy Davis case
3. Follow us on twitter (@amnesty) and retweet our #IamTroy tweets.
4. Share the image below on facebook.
5. If you live in California, pledge to support Prop 34 in the November 6 general election.
6. Help us bring light to another death row prisoner whose case is riddled with problems.

There is no shortage of activities for our collective power to end the death penalty.

We are still Troy Davis and we will succeed!

Troy Davis was executed by the State of Georgia in 2011 despite a strong case for innocence. © Scott Langley

If Troy Davis was innocent, the justice system failed and made murderers of us all. The state of Georgia ended Troy Davis’ life on behalf of its citizens and the federal courts, on behalf of all U.S. citizens, allowed it to happen.

Of course, murder is an unlawful homicide and execution is a lawful homicide.  So, technically speaking, we are not murderers because it is lawful in the United States to execute the innocent.  In Herrera v. Collins, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to rule that it would be unconstitutional for an innocent person to be executed as long as he or she had access to the judicial process.  Legal nonsense aside, Troy Davis’ blood is on all of our hands.

It is no wonder that a million signatures were amassed on petitions calling on Georgia to halt Troy Davis’ execution and that the media was all over the story.  Nobody wanted to have to answer the question, “Was Troy Davis innocent?” after the fact.  You didn’t have to be on the ground, like I was, outside the prison or at any of the number of demonstrations around the world the night of Troy Davis’ execution, to feel the palpable shockwave of disbelief.

Carlos DeLuna was executed by the state of Texas in 1989. A new study by Columbia University could prove his innocence.

It seemed completely unreasonable to the average person who came to understand how the case against Troy had come unraveled that his execution wouldn’t be stopped.  And those more cynical about the reasonable nature of government could not believe that the state was willing to let its reputation take such a bad hit.

How could our government allow any room for doubt in a death penalty case?  And why do we have any kind of tolerance for the execution of the innocent?

If you’re skeptical that it happens, consider that 140 individuals have been exonerated from death row since 1973, fortunately escaping execution.  Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor said to a group of lawyers in 2001:

“If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.”

We can also ask, “What if Cameron Todd Willingham or Carlos de Luna were innocent?”  Both executed in Texas.  There is compelling analysis of their cases that make it easy to conclude that they were.

Amnesty International got a lot of traction with Troy Davis’ case because innocence is perhaps the most compelling issue connected to the death penalty, and the facts backing up his innocence claim were compelling.  However, we sometimes got the question, “What if Troy Davis is guilty?”  We picked up his case because it was riddled with many problems that we see plaguing the application of the U.S. death penalty.  It was no wonder he had an innocence claim.  In the process of trying to prevent his execution, we were able to help people understand the reality of the broken death penalty.

At the end of the day, we’re in the struggle to end executions because we believe governments should not have the irreversible and terrible power over life.  The issue of innocence has helped us to make this point.  The good news is that we do not need the death penalty to be safe or to hold those who murder accountable.  Justice does not require that the blood of anyone, guilty or innocent, be on our hands.

Reggie Clemons at day one of the trial that will determine if he lives or dies. © Scott Langley

Day one of the Reggie Clemons hearing concluded in St Louis, Missouri yesterday.  I left with its intensity lingering in my bones.  Directly in front of me was the man himself, Reggie Clemons, sitting quietly in a suit provided to him less than an hour before the hearing was to begin.  His alert eyes followed the proceedings that will have a bearing on whether he will live or die.  To my right was Rev. Thomas, his father.  In front of him was the victims’ mother, Mrs. Kerry.  Both sat silently.  I guessed that they had a mixture of numbness and pain in the face of a 21-year legal process set in motion by the terrible events of a dark night in 1991.

Behind me was an audibly frustrated woman, who I learned was the grandmother of one of the other two African American men who, with Reggie, was sent to death row.  (His sentence has since been changed to life).  Filling in the remaining stretches of pew space in the small courthouse were mostly Reggie supporters and some journalists.

The hearing got off to a smooth start with little emotion, despite the intense feelings running through the many individuals in the room who had a connection to the human beings involved in the case.  Reggie’s lawyers presented their theory of what actually happened in the case and why he deserved to have his death sentence removed and a new trial granted.  The state described the case from a very different point of view and argued that Reggie’s case should stand as it is because there was no new evidence, except for some new DNA testing, which they will describe in more detail as the hearing proceeds this week.

Reggie’s father, Rev. Reynolds Thomas speaks out in support of his son at a rally in St. Louis on September 15. © Scott Langley

Reggie’s lawyers called two witnesses to the stand and played a video of a third witness who they had previously deposed.  Their focus for most of the day was to prove that the prosecutor (who was cross-examined) acted inappropriately by editing a police report that was key to the case.  The video-recorded police detective said, “I don’t think a prosecutor has ever made changes to a draft report.”  He agreed that many of the lines struck from the original report were inappropriately removed in the final report.  The draft of the report showed the DA’s handwritten notes marking which lines to omit from the final version.  This included the coast guard’s assessment of the river and how unlikely the star witness’ story was that he jumped into the river and could survive.  It also changed the sense that the star witness offered testimony on his own, in one version of the story, rather than as a result of police suggestion.

The state pushed back that the defense had ample opportunity to challenge this at trial and other stages in the legal process.  And if they were right to a certain extent, what does it mean when you have an incompetent lawyer who fails to mount a vigorous defense?  Are you simply out of luck, especially if you face a prosecutor whose behavior was essentially the opposite – aggressive to the point of being found in contempt of court, ordered to pay a fine?  After all, the law requires that you get to go through the process, but does not require that the defense and prosecution are equally matched.

And what does it mean for the families to go through numerous proceedings, trying to address these issues that get calcified in a legal system that doesn’t like to alter the course set at the trial?

This process is an important opening.  The Missouri Supreme Court’s willingness to assign a special master to Reggie’s case was an unusual and significant move.  I hope that more truth will come to light so that the human rights of all involved are ultimately respected and these families can start to heal.  The truth that is shining brightly for me is how dangerous and damaging it is to allow fallible institutions made up of fallible human beings to wield such awful and uncorrectable power.

Take action to stop the execution of Reggie Clemons

Every week in the United States, execution warrants are signed.  Each one, a short and stiff legal document, creates a wave of terror.  An execution warrant instructs public servants to kill a human being.  It informs the prisoner of the time and date on which he or she will be killed.  It lets the prisoner’s family know when they must prepare for the calculated death of someone they love.  It promises the murder victims’ families the intangible sense of closure, but re-exposes them to the difficult spotlight of media attention on the worst moment in their lives and represents yet another step in the grueling process of the death penalty.

While we had made plans in anticipation of Troy’s fourth execution warrant, news of its arrival sent an adrenaline rush through all of us at Amnesty.  We reconnected with Troy’s resilient family and set those plans in motion, but we were never satisfied, always feeling that more could be done.  And that’s how we feel about the death penalty.  More must be done to end this horrible and fundamental violation of human rights that creates more suffering and not more justice.

Troy Davis did not need to die, especially under the tremendous cloud of doubt that plagued his case.  In fact, no one needs to die, guilty or innocent.  We will never forget Troy Davis, we will not let the world forget him and we won’t let those in power off the hook.  We are his legacy.  We are the vibrant and organized movement that is ending the death penalty.  I asked Kim Davis, one of Troy’s sisters, how we ought to mark the one-year anniversary of Troy’s execution.  She replied, “Well, I’m not gonna stand around at some vigil.”  She made it clear that the Davis family is still a family of fighters.  They want Troy’s name cleared and they want to help us prevent other families from having to go through the nightmare they have been through.

Please stay tuned for actions and social media content you can share in the coming weeks because we are still Troy Davis!

The Old Chain of Rocks Bridge

I have never been numb to the loss of human life in murder cases, though my work to end the death penalty has meant that I have spent most of my time trying to prevent the executions of those who are convicted of murder.  The story of the 1991 “Chain of Rocks Murder Case,” as it is known in St. Louis, is especially poignant to me not just because I am working to stop the execution of Reggie Clemons—a man convicted as an accomplice to the murders and given the death penalty—but because I also have much in common with the two young women who perished.

I am not a family member of a murder victim, and I have no real connection to Julie and Robin Kerry, the women who died twenty-one years ago.  So I am grateful to Jeanine Cummins, one of their cousins, for having written about Julie and Robin Kerry, and the terrible journey their family experienced.  Her writing has helped me build a larger picture of the meaning of this case and the people it has impacted.

If Julie Kerry were still alive, she and I would about the same age. Like her, I am a white, middle class kid from a decent family with deep spiritual roots.  Their grandfather studied to be a priest at one point; my father is a pastor.  Like both of them, I became a supporter of Amnesty International as a teenager and had posters and t-shirts in support of social justice causes.  And while I don’t think I am the gifted writer that Julie was, I have, like her, used writing to proclaim my ideals and urge people to work for a better world.

The loss of these two young women goes beyond adjectives like “tragic” or “terrible.”  It is my hope that in society’s quest for justice in murder cases that we will not compound the tragedy of the victim’s death by putting other families through the excruciating experience of having their loved ones killed.  It is also my sincere hope that we in the anti-death penalty movement do not lose sight of or fail to acknowledge the original victims in capital cases: the murder victims.

The death penalty is such a charged issue that it often moves the spotlight from murder victims to those sentenced to death for the crimes.  For this reason, family members of some murder victims support the abolition of the death penalty, arguing that a life sentence would actually have given them greater and more rapid closure than the controversy and often lengthy legal processes associated with death penalty cases.

In our campaign to stop Georgia from executing Troy Davis, we used the slogan, I am Troy Davis to emphasize the humanity of a man whom the state had written off as “a monster who deserved to be killed.”  We sought a way to express the principle that human rights are inalienable and belong to us all, and that we all must therefore be invested in each other’s dignity and rights.

This is true not just for the innocent but for those cases in which someone has done the unthinkable.  It is equally true for murder victims.  I could say “I am Reggie Clemons” to make the same point.  And really, I could say, “I am Julie and Robin Kerry,” too, because all three were born with the right to life.

On this day, the 21^st anniversary of the deaths of Julie and Robin Kerry, I would like to offer my deepest sympathy to their loved ones on behalf of an organization that was founded to decrease suffering and injustice.  And I continue to pray for a world where the human right to life is upheld by individuals and governments alike.

Vera Clemons, Reggie Clemons' mother, and AI activist Meredith outside of Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri

On a recent Friday morning, I paid a visit to Reggie Clemons. I wanted to learn who this convicted accomplice to a double murder, condemned prisoner and human being is. I made the journey to Potosi Correctional Center with Vera, Reggie’s mother, and Meredith, a St. Louis Amnesty leader.

Outside a large concrete fortress in the middle of nowhere, prison workers stood taking a smoke break as we pulled into the parking lot. Walking toward the entrance, we passed the beginning of a long fence with endless loops of razor wire from the ground up, electrified for good measure. I stopped at the electrocution warning sign on the fence and took some moments to prepare myself for the intense, regimented environment of every death row.

A professional and pleasant female guard wearing a ton of makeup and a Glock pistol on her belt greeted us and checked us in. Vera was steps ahead of us. I suspect she could do this visit sleepwalking, having come here countless times for two decades. She fed dollar bills into a machine to add quarters to her prison-approved, clear zip-top bag. We followed her through a series of gates controlled by armed guards down cinder block hallways until we found ourselves in the visitors’ room. We signed our names once more and were assigned to a table. Several prisoners were seated at tables around us, some playing cards with their visitors.

Some minutes later, Reggie entered the room, pushing a wheelchair to help a fellow prisoner meet his visitor. He greeted us warmly with a hug and sat down, almost forgetting to embrace his mother, Vera. She popped up as soon as we all sat down and took the next step in her prison ritual. She asked Reggie what he’d like from the vending machines and they laughed, almost able to telepathically communicate his order of spicy junk food.

Meredith and I started talking with Reggie very naturally, joking about how he and his mother willfully mispronounce “jalapeno” and how endearing Vera is in autopilot mode. We spoke about his admirable parents, deeply compassionate and caring people who pastor a church in St. Louis. Reggie shared the challenges he faces trying to live out their values in an environment where confrontation is commonplace and survival is the goal. The swastika tattoo on top of another prisoner’s shaved head in the visiting room gave us a glimpse of Reggie’s daily life.

Reggie spoke about a wide range of subjects, demonstrating a truly active and inventive mind. He talked about redesigning helicopters for the military to make soldiers less vulnerable to enemy fire. He had ideas for how businesses could make capitalism more ethical and humane for workers. We learned about weird food concoctions he has made from the limited number of ingredients he can buy from the prison store. And he talked about wanting to start a charity for death row inmates to help raise funds for life-affirming projects, like planting trees and preserving habitats.

I was struck by how young he looks for forty and what a waste our prisons are for those who are very much alive and could contribute something positive to society, including those they have harmed. Instead, our system is focused on warehousing individuals, and killing some, in a political context where “rehabilitation” is a meaningless word used only by the so-called naïve.

Leaving the prison, I thought about the Kerry sisters who were so young when they perished in the Mississippi River twenty-one years ago. They were full of promise and ideals, and their horrible deaths created a wound that can never fully heal for those who loved them. Reggie was convicted for playing a role in their deaths, Although he maintains he had nothing to do with it and has no idea what happened to them. Given the many issues of unfairness that riddle his case and the 140 death row exonerations in the U.S., I find his claim impossible to ignore.

Guilty or innocent, meeting Reggie Clemons, a living, breathing person, sharpened my belief that taking a human being’s life to rectify the taking of other human beings’ lives is too simple an equation for such an irreplaceable loss–and too inherently contradictory a moral proposition. My brief experience visiting another maximum security prison also confirmed my understanding that prison is kind of purgatory.

Given the very limited number of choices prisoners can make for themselves, the penalties for crossing the innumerable rules, and the slow death incarceration inflicts upon a person’s future and dreams, prison truly is punishment. But unlike the death penalty, incarceration does not deepen the suffering caused by more death and compromise our societal value that killing is wrong.

Volumes have been written about his powerful life and legacy.  Innumerable awards and tributes have been paid to this giant for justice.  Many often imagine how much more he would have accomplished had he not been killed at such a young age.

I have no doubt that Dr. King, if he were alive today, would be an outspoken critic of the U.S. criminal justice system and a bold and authoritative voice for an end to the death penalty (below are ways you can act to end the death penalty too).

When Dr. King was alive, he addressed the issue directly:

I do not think God approves the death penalty for any crime – rape and murder included. Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.

Just a few years after King’s death, in the 1970s, lawmakers started to reorient the U.S. criminal justice system.  Harsher punishments were introduced, not because crime was becoming an uncontrollable crisis, but because politicians found that fear of crime could be exploited for political gain.  Investments in rehabilitation and prevention were eroded by a cynical “tough on crime” approach that made monsters out of “criminals,” but did not actually result in greater public safety.

The result today is a system of human warehousing at a scale never before seen.  With over 2 million people locked up in its prisons and jails, the U.S. has established itself as the greatest incarcerator in the world. And those leaving prisons after serving their sentences face social and economic barriers that trap them in a permanent cycle of marginalization.

Dr. King would likely call our society out for allowing this silent human rights crisis to continue.  The lives of millions of people of color and the poor are being destroyed figuratively and literally with no practical or moral gain.  The death penalty, both in the U.S. and around the world, is discriminatory and is used disproportionately against the poor, minorities and members of racial, ethnic and religious communities.

The death penalty is one of the worst symptoms of this terrible system that also puts the U.S. in a shameful light.  Country after country started abandoning capital punishment in the decades following King’s death.  Only a small handful were abolitionist in King’s day, but now 139 countries have stopped using capital punishment.  In the U.S., death sentences and executions at first continued to grow in number, peaking in the 1990s.  Fortunately this trend has now reversed, giving us hope that we will see an end to this outmoded and inhuman practice.

Dr. King applied the ethic of non-violence to social change.  At its essence was a deep respect for the human dignity in all people, including the oppressor and the perpetrator of violence.  This is not to excuse those who commit crimes or to ignore the need for accountability and justice.  What is important is how we, as a society, go about meeting the needs of victims so that we raise up rather than damage our values.

King understood that “violence is … a descending spiral,” and that “returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”  A system that asks public servants who work in prisons to actively carry out homicides on behalf of the people is fundamentally violent.  The use of the law, precise protocols, medical equipment and polite behavior may create an appearance of legitimacy, but those who carry out the act of killing a human being are damaged by this inhuman act and we are all damaged because it is done in our name.

In the wake of the outrageous execution of Troy Davis, African American human rights leaders have found new passion to define the death penalty as a major justice issue for our day.  We are proud to stand with the NAACP and other civil rights leaders to bring this issue to the American public with more vigor in 2012.  Lawmakers in Maryland and Connecticut have the votes to end their death penalties this year if we can mobilize the needed pressure from their constituents.

Join us, as Dr. King would have, by taking action and spreading the word:

• Sign up for the Death Penalty Action Weeks (Feb. 27-Mar. 11).
• Take action for for Reggie Clemons, whose case has so many similarities to Troy’s and who is at risk of execution this year.
• On King Day (Monday, January 16), take Dr. King’s message to Facebook and Twitter by sharing the photo above on your Facebook wall and tweeting Dr. King’s quotes below.

We know that Dr. King would be front and center in this cause if he were with us today.  Help us build on the human rights legacy that he helped create by taking action to end the death penalty!

Tweets you can use on January 16 (King Day):

#MLK: “I do not think God approves the #DeathPenalty for any crime – rape and murder included.” http://bit.ly/Aiwzo7 via @amnesty [CLICK HERE TO TWEET]

#MLK: The #deathpenalty is against “modern criminology and…the highest expression of love in the nature of God.” http://bit.ly/Aiwzo7 [CLICK HERE TO TWEET]

#MLK: “Capital punishment is society’s final assertion that it will not forgive.” http://bit.ly/Aiwzo7 via @amnesty [CLICK HERE TO TWEET]

#MLK: “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” End the #deathpenalty! http://bit.ly/Aiwzo7 [CLICK HERE TO TWEET]

#MLK: “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence.” http://bit.ly/Aiwzo7 [CLICK HERE TO TWEET]

#MLK: “Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation.” http://bit.ly/Aiwzo7 [CLICK HERE TO TWEET]

Martina Davis Correia

Our friend and fellow warrior for human rights, Martina Davis Correia, has passed on.  She stopped breathing at about 6:28pm on December 1st in Savannah, Georgia while I stood near her hospital bed along with family and friends.  She passed in peace, though she endured a painful struggle following the failure of a liver that had taken a severe beating in the course of a decade’s worth of cancer treatments.

Martina changed us and she changed our world.  She spoke truth to power in the way that a prophet does: bringing a timely message out of the margins and to the masses with a conviction that we wish our leaders in power had.  But while millions would come to hear her story, she began as a voice crying in the wilderness speaking to very small groups.  The first rally we organized for her brother Troy Davis in 2007 at the state capitol in Atlanta drew a crowd of just forty people.  This year, when the state set a fourth execution date for Davis, thousands came out and marched with us through the streets of Atlanta and thousands more gathered in about 300 locations around the world in solidarity.  Traditional and social media coverage of the Davis story expanded the audience to hundreds of millions of people and about a million signed the petitions for clemency.  No exaggeration.

Martina needed us, the human rights movement, to lift her up where she could be seen and to hand her a powerful microphone so that she could be heard.  And we needed her, a modern-day prophet for human rights who inspired so many people to get involved with the effort to abolish the death penalty as an important imperative within the larger struggle for human rights.  She motivated us when the struggle seemed difficult and insurmountable.  She compelled us to fight hard for justice; after all, if this odds-defying woman was battling cancer, raising a son and working hard to save her brother, in a hostile environment, there was nothing we could not do.

It was indeed a privilege to work side-by-side with her in our campaign for her brother’s life.  Through hard, persistent and inspired work, we built this movement together.  For over a decade, Martina was a volunteer leader with Amnesty International, working on a variety of issues, though specializing in death penalty abolition work.  She came to Amnesty because she believed in her brother and wanted to help him and countless others who faced injustice.  It was never just about her brother – her vision was always bigger.

Martina fought her deteriorating body every step of the way to hold onto life and to be in this world for her family and for the human family.  Her body finally gave out, living eleven years longer than doctors predicted she would.  It is unimaginable what stress and hardship she and her family faced having a loved one on death row who was almost executed three times, then finally killed by the state she called home and in the country she served as a military and civilian nurse.  Martina’s mother, though in perfect health, died shortly after Troy Davis’ final appeal was denied and a few months before his execution.  The families of murder victims and the families of death row prisoners endure enormous pain.  The death penalty is horrifically destructive, creating a downward spiral of violence that drags so many people down in its wake.  We must end it so that an authentic justice that brings us accountability, healing and a better future can take root and blossom.

When I was in the hospital on Martina’s final day, I asked her sister Kim if the crowd of visiting friends jammed in the hospital room should leave to give her and her family some time alone with Martina.  Kim said without hesitation, “No, that’s Ok, we’re all family here.”  And that’s exactly what Martina, Troy and the other Davises believed too.  We’re all part of one human family.  Our destinies are connected.  Our rights, our dignity and our well-being are connected.  Martina, sister warrior, we love you, we are deeply thankful you were here.  We know your spirit is still joined with ours to carry on the struggle for the rights of everyone in the human family.

Many of you have spent countless hours collecting signatures on petitions, organizing educational events, telling everyone you know about this remarkable case. And because of it, people are thinking about the death penalty differently. They are coming to understand the reality of this callous system that creates more victims and solves no problems.

The Davis family is deeply thankful for your support. They recognize that many of you come to have a personal connection to Troy Davis and to them. They would like supporters to be able to join them. Because not everyone can come to Savannah, they have asked for the Celebration of Life service to be livestreamed here.

The slogan “I am Troy Davis” has been a powerful rallying call. It has spoken to our common humanity, which is at the core of human rights and why we took a stand in this case and why we oppose the death penalty in all cases.

We have heard innumerable stories of consciousness raising and transformation. People did not go home from the various protests despondent. Like us, they have committed to not forgetting what happened and are emboldened, redoubling efforts to end the callous system that has demonstrated it has no business taking human life.

On Saturday, October 1, join us for a Day of Remembrance.

Join us in Savannah for Troy Davis’ funeral. The service is open to the public, but media cameras will not be permitted:

October 1, 11am
“Celebration of Life Service”
Jonesville Baptist Church
5201 Montgomery St., Savannah, Georgia

For those of you who cannot make it to Savannah, please wear an “I am Troy Davis” t-shirt or black armband with “Not in my name” written on it and change your Facebook profile picture to this image:

Those wishing to send cards or donations to the Davis family:
“I am Troy Davis,” P.O. Box 2105, Savannah, GA 31407

Contributions to the Davis children’s college savings accounts can be made payable to Martina Correia, put “college fund” in the memo.

Flowers and plants can be sent to:
Sidney A. Jones and Campbell Funeral Services
124 West Park Avenue, Savannah, GA 31401-6439
(912) 234-7226

If you have not yet signed the “Not in my name” pledge, please be sure to do so.

Troy Davis did not die in vain. We will make certain of that.