Let’s hang Afzal Guru — I

Along time ago, I read a haunting excerpt from a concentration camp survivor. It was convention at the camp described, to give an extra ladle of soup to those due for execution the same day. Once, when the soup was running out, a man who was shortly to go to the gas chamber kept standing in front of the server with his bowl in his hand. He didn’t move until he was given the additional helping. Then, he went off quietly.

The state of Texas just did away with the last meals for death row inmates. After Lawrence Brewer, who was convicted of one of America’s most gruesome hate crimes, ordered this his final meal.

Texas was outraged by the size of the spread, and promptly ended the last meal convention.

Brewer, a white supremacist gang member, was convicted for the 1998 murder of a black man. Forensic evidence established that he and his accomplices had chained James Byrd to the back of a truck and dragged him for miles as the road ripped off his limbs and severed his head.

Brewer was given his lethal injection on September 21, the same day as Troy Davis, a black man from Georgia. The Davis case was world news: not for his final meal, but more for his final words — repeating, as he had done for more than two decades, that he was innocent.

Davis had been convicted for killing an off duty cop after a scuffle in a parking lot in 1989. He gave himself up after a massive manhunt was mounted. Partly because local drug dealers threatened his family: all the heat in the area as the police looked for Davis was hurting their business.

The Davis case had gone everywhere the law could take it, and all appeals were exhausted. What the state of Georgia was saying was that it had to eventually follow procedure. In this case, procedure demanded administering a lethal injection to a man who may or may not have been guilty.

Davis’ guilt was apparently established a long time ago. But subsequently, many of the testimonies (there was no clinching DNA or other scientific evidence) on which it rested were recanted or admitted to be false. Witnesses said later that they had implicated Davis under pressure from the police; that they had lied in their original testimony; one said he had heard another man admit to the killing.

On the directions of the Supreme Court, a special hearing was held in 2010 to evaluate the new evidence. But this court placed the burden of proof entirely on the defendant. “The burden was on Mr Davis to prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that no reasonable juror would have convicted him in light of the new evidence,” the judge said.

The judge, however, also made an awkward admission: “While Mr Davis’s new evidence casts some additional, minimal doubt on his conviction, it is largely smoke and mirrors”.

But in 2007, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and paroles had stayed the execution on the grounds that its members needed to be convinced that there was “no doubt” about Davis’ guilt.

Davis is now dead, but it would be reasonable to assume that, at the very least, the “additional, minimal doubt” the judge grudgingly didn’t give him the benefit of, lives on.

The US judicial system will have to live with the fact that it may have killed an innocent man.

How does this sit in the “collective conscience” of a nation? I use the phrase because it was a critical part of the Supreme Court of India’s reasoning when it sentenced Afzal Guru to death in the 2001 Parliament attack case.

The attack on Parliament was a rare and grave crime, whose consequences went well beyond the lives lost. It was seen as an assault on democracy. Two countries almost went to war over it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the collective conscience of a nation will be satisfied if the wrong man hangs for it.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 30^th,  2011.