I Am Troy Davis

By Jen Marlowe, Martina Davis-Correia, Troy Davis and Helen Prejean

The true story of a woman’s fight for her brother’s life—and her own: “Essential for those interested in the U.S. justice system” (Library Journal).
 
On September 21, 2011, Troy Anthony Davis was put to death by the State of Georgia. Davis’s execution was protested by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, and Pope Benedict XVI, Pres. Jimmy Carter, and fifty-one members of Congress all appealed for clemency. Davis’s older sister, Martina, a former Army flight nurse who had served in the Gulf War, was one of Davis’s strongest advocates—despite the fact that she was battling liver and metastatic breast cancer and died just weeks after her brother’s death by lethal injection.
 
This book, coauthored by Martina and writer Jen Marlowe, tells the intimate story of an ordinary man caught up in an inexorable tragedy. From his childhood in racially charged Savannah; to the confused events that led to the 1989 shooting of a police officer; to Davis’s sudden arrest, conviction, and two-decade fight to prove his innocence, I Am Troy Davis takes us inside a broken legal system where life and death hang in the balance. It is also an inspiring testament to the unbreakable bond of family and the resilience of love, and reminds us that even when you reach the end of justice, voices from across the world can rise together in chorus and proclaim, “I am Troy Davis.”

“Martina Correia’s heroic fight to save her brother’s life while battling for her own serves as a powerful testament for activists.” —The Nation

“Should be read and cherished.” —Maya Angelou, author and civil rights activist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781608462957

Book preview

Part One

June 29, 2007

The phone was ringing when Martina returned home from her chemotherapy treatment.

Hello?

Hello. This is Global Tel Link with a collect call from Troy Davis at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. Martina punched through all the buttons required in order to accept the call.

Tina?

She could hear something in his voice.

What’s the matter?

I just got this paper that I have to fill out, and I need you to help me.

What is it?

Warden William Terry had called Troy to his office. With his deputy present and surrounded by Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT) officers, the warden began reading. The Court having sentenced Defendant, Troy Anthony Davis, on the 3rd day of September, 1991, to be executed by the Department of Corrections at such penal institution as may be designated by said Department . . . The date, time, and method were all spelled out: July 17, 7 p.m., with a three-drug cocktail to first numb him, then paralyze him, then stop his heart. The warden had told him to sign the document, Troy told Martina, but he refused to sign his own death warrant, as if he agreed to those terms. Next, the counselor had entered and had given Troy a form. Troy then had thirty minutes to fill it out and return it.

I have to decide who my final visitors will be. I have to tell them if I want my organs donated.

If Troy elected to have his body returned to his family, he continued, it would have to go first to the state crime lab in Atlanta. His family would have to pay for an autopsy to determine the cause of his death.

Cause of death? Martina echoed, dumbfounded. After killing her brother, the state would require an autopsy to determine the cause of his death?

If you all don’t want to pay to bring my body back to Savannah, they’ll bury me on the prison grounds in a pine box for $25. Those are our options.

Martina could hear her brother’s words but could not quite grasp their meaning. She felt as if she were in the Twilight Zone.

We’ll give them this information, Troy, but they’re not going to need it, Martina finally said, jaw clenched.

They went through the questions one by one: Did he want to record any final words? Did he want a last meal? Troy’s voice cracked only once or twice as he and Martina drew up the list of the last twenty-four people who would see him alive. Cradling the landline receiver with Troy on it on one shoulder, Martina called friends and family members from her cell phone.

Troy has an execution date for July 17, she informed each stunned person. Would you like to visit him on one of the two final days?

She updated Troy on who could visit and on which day as he filled out the information on his form. As family was not permitted to be inside the execution chamber with him, his attorney, Jay Ewart, would witness the execution.

When Troy’s phone time was over, Martina hung up, allowed herself exactly five minutes to cry, and then sharply pulled herself together. She hoped nobody would ask her about the details of that thirty-minute phone call, planning with Troy his death and funeral. She did not think she would ever be able to repeat that conversation.

The walls in her house were thin. Martina could hear Mama in the next bedroom late that night, crying and praying. What possible comfort could she offer her mother? She lay awake in bed, listening to her mother’s desperate plea throughout the long, sleepless night: Please don’t let them kill my child. Please don’t let them kill my child.

§ § §

Virginia Roberts Davis, mother of Martina, Troy, Kimberly, Lester, and Ebony, was born on May 19, 1945, in a house on Myrtle Street in Savannah, Georgia, that her father, Screven Eugene Roberts, built himself.

When Virginia was twelve years old, her mother took sick with pneumonia and passed the following week. Screven, blind in one eye from an untreated steel-mill injury, did his best to care for his three daughters, but Mattie, the eldest, Annalee, the middle sister, and Virginia mostly had to fend for themselves. By the time Virginia reached high school, her father had lost sight in his second eye as well. Annalee contracted polio shortly after her mother died and gradually grew weaker. She finally passed on the sofa with her head in fourteen-year-old Virginia’s lap. Mattie got married soon after, leaving Virginia at home with her father, who remarried shortly after.

When Virginia finished high school, she found a job at a coffee shop next to the Chatham County Courthouse. A man named Joseph worked in the courthouse as a deputy sheriff and frequented the coffee shop regularly, chatting with Virginia. One day, Joseph casually asked Virginia where she lived. Next thing she knew, Joseph rode out to her house on his bicycle. He started coming by more often and, although Joseph was quite a bit older and had previously been married with children, Virginia was certain she was in love.

Virginia was eighteen years old when she married Joseph. Martina arrived after five years of marriage in the early hours of May 13, 1967. Mama, ecstatic, bought Martina all the things that a baby girl should have: a sweet little bassinet, a stroller, pretty clothes. But Martina was Daddy’s little girl from the start. Joseph took his infant daughter everywhere with him.

Where have you been at with that baby? Virginia demanded, hand on hip, when Joseph opened the front door late one night with little Martina tucked contentedly into the crook of his arm.

We was down there to the pool hall, shooting pool, Joseph answered.

You took the baby to the pool hall? Who was holding her while you was shooting pool?

Oh, we had her sitting up on the pool table, Joseph grinned as Virginia shook her head.

Troy was born less than seventeen months later on October 9, 1968. Two peas in a pod, Virginia said about her pair of little ones as she pushed them together in the stroller. Kimberly came along two years after Troy, providing Mama with two little girls to dress in frilly outfits with matching bonnets and Shirley Temple curls tight enough for Troy to pull them taut and watch them go boing back into place on their heads. Martina had no use for Shirley Temple. She wanted to play half-rubber and run with the boys.

Martina and Troy were always thick as thieves. T & T, they called themselves, Tina and Troy. Together they could accomplish any feat. They felt quite sure of this as they hatched an ambitious plot one Christmas Eve—they would catch Santa Claus in action. They lay in their beds that night, eyes screwed tightly shut as they feigned sleep until the murmur of Mama’s and Daddy’s voices subsided and the house fell still. Silently, making sure not to wake Kimberly, Martina crawled on her hands and knees out of the bedroom and met Troy on his hands and knees at their rendezvous point in the hallway, poking each other and stifling their giggles as they settled onto their pajama-clad bellies for their Santa