Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in the state of Georgia on September 21.

American death culture rears its ugly head yet again, this time in the judicial realm. As Amy Goodman says in the linked article, the imminent killing of Davis, an African American, is nothing more than a legal lynching.

That Davis is innocent there can be little if any doubt, let alone reasonable doubt. His conviction was based upon coerced testimony. Seven of the nine witnesses against him have recanted their words. An eighth is likely to be the actual culprit. There is no physical evidence connecting Davis to the death of a white off-duty police officer in Georgia. But in that lynch-happy state, no excuse is really needed to murder yet another Black.

So what if he’s innocent? Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting from a decision that ordered a review of Davis’ case, stated that “actual innocence” should be no bar to carrying out a death sentence. The Georgia judge who subsequently conducted the review refused, on a legal technicality, to permit testimony that a witness against Davis had subsequently admitted to the crime.

In today’s Georgia they use a lethal dose of poison, not a rope over a tree branch. But it’s the same old racist story, bolstered these days by a wider context: middle America’s burgeoning, and frankly fascistic, love affair with death.