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Mark MacPhail was murdered. The body of the white police officer was found fatally shot in Savannah, Georgia on August 19, 1989. Black and poor, Troy Anthony Davis was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. Many people believe Davis innocent. In 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the District Court in Savannah to grant Davis an evidentiary hearing. Davis was found "not innocent." Post-conviction, "not innocent" is a complex signifier. In this case it was constructed by the District Court through four interpretive lenses: Georgia's relation to the death penalty, the Anti-terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), Supreme Court rulings, and the District Court's subjective imaginary. As each of these interpretive lenses is imbued with racism, the question of whether Georgia will execute an innocent man becomes starkly real. In this paper, I examine the post-conviction construction of "not innocent" as it relates to the Troy Davis case.

How the Irish proved they were white? : Irish, America, race, and the Anglo-Irish War / Troy D. Davis -- They came, they saw, and they purchased : a history of tourism in Ireland / Rory T. Cornish

This essay seeks to clarify conceptually the common structure uniting many of the incidents in the recent crescendo of police killings of people of color, going beyond their shared racist framework. In tandem with the 'new Jim Crow' that Michelle Alexander describes, these killings pertain to the role of the police as the selection mechanism enforcing a new color line. The author focuses on the killings of Oscar Grant, Alan Blueford, Trayvon Martin, and Troy Davis. When connected by their common threads, these killings reveal aspects of the cultural structure of racialization in the United States. The essay concludes by looking at the politicolegal goal of this epidemic of killings. Adapted from the source document.