local news
Davis
continued from page 1
conviction.
MacPhail was working security at a bus
station on Aug. 19, 1989, and rushed to the
aid of Larry Young, a homeless man who
prosecutors say Davis was bashing with a
handgun after asking him for a beer. When
MacPhail got there, they say Davis had a
smirk on his face as he shot the officer to
death in a Burger King parking lot. Others
have claimed the man with Davis that night
has told people he actually shot the officer.
No gun was ever found, but shell casings
were linked, prosecutors say, to an earlier
shooting for which Davis was convicted.
Witnesses placed Davis at the crime scene
and identified him as the shooter. However,
no other physical evidence was found,
including blood or DNA, that tied Davis to
the crime.
As time ticked toward the execution, an
upbeat and prayerful Davis turned down an
offer for a special last meal and planned to
spend his final hours meeting with friends,
family and supporters. Meanwhile, two
attempts to prove his innocence were reject-
ed: a polygraph test and another hearing
before the pardons board.
His attorney Stephen Marsh said Davis
would only submit to a polygraph test if
pardons officials would take it seriously.
“He doesn’t want to spend three hours
away from his family on what could be the
last day of his life if it won’t make any dif-
ference,” Marsh said.
His lawyers, meanwhile, are trying the
legal avenues left to them, filing a motion in
a county court challenging the ballistics evi-
dence and eyewitness testimony. A judge
As for the new and
changed accounts
by some witnesses,
an unmoved federal
judge dismissed them
in 2010
could at least delay the execution, which
has happened three times before. Most
believe arguments on the merits of the case
have been exhausted, however.
The National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, which has
helped lead the charge to stop the execution,
said it was considering asking President
Barack Obama to intervene. Obama cannot
grant Davis clemency since it was a state
conviction, but could potentially halt the
execution by asking for an investigation
into a federal issue if one exists, though that
was unlikely, said Richard Dieter, executive
director of the Death Penalty Information
Center.
In Savannah, 16 Davis supporters gath-
ered at the Chatham County courthouse to
press District Attorney Larry Chisolm to
help stop Davis’ execution. They said
240,000 people had signed petitions urging
the state to spare Davis’ life, and delivered
them in three large boxes to Chisolm’s
courthouse office where they were received
by a member of the prosecutor’s staff.
Chisolm has said he’s powerless to inter-
vene, but activists say they believe he has
enough influence as district attorney to
sway the outcome.
As for the new and changed accounts by
some witnesses, an unmoved federal judge
dismissed them during a hearing set up by
the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010. He said
while the “new evidence casts some addi-
tional, minimal doubt on his conviction, it is
largely smoke and mirrors.”
It was the first time in 50 years that jus-
tices had considered a request to grant a
new trial for a death row inmate. It set a
tough standard for Davis to exonerate him-
self, ruling his attorneys must “clearly
establish” Davis’ innocence - a higher bar to
meet than prosecutors having to prove guilt.
Once the hearing judge made his ruling,
the justices didn’t take up the case.
Prosecutors say they have no doubt they
charged the right person, and MacPhail’s
family lobbied the pardons board Monday
to reject Davis’ clemency appeal. The board
refused to stop the execution a day later.
“He has had ample time to prove his inno-
cence,” said MacPhail’s widow, Joan
MacPhail-Harris. “And he is not innocent.”
In Europe, where the planned execution
has drawn widespread criticism, politicians
and activists were making a last-minute
appeal to the state of Georgia to refrain
from
executing
Davis.
Amnesty
International and other groups planned a
protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Paris
later Wednesday and Amnesty also called a
vigil outside the U.S. Embassy in London.
Parliamentarians and government minis-
ters from the Council of Europe, the conti-
nent’s human rights watchdog, called for
“interest cards,” each of which – if filled out
properly and submitted on time – will be
entered into a series of lotteries from which
a roster of “casual worker” hires will be
made.
These “casual workers,” who are non-
union laborers without any medical benefits
or job perks, are the pool of workers from
which a Portland International Longshore
“So we’d like to see more of you guys
down there working with us and that’s why
we organized this on our own time.”
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Workers
continued from page 1
Complaint charging racial discrimination in
1995. Reforms were enacted that eventually
brought five of the six into the union, but
African American workers have repeatedly
charged that the PMA and the ILWU con-
tinue to keep jobs away from women and
workers of color.
A groundbreaking series of articles in the
late 1990s by Seattle Times business
reporter Stanley Holmes uncovered rampant
problems; by 1997, eight discrimination
lawsuits were pending against the Seattle
longshore workers’ union and the PMA.
“Several Seattle and Tacoma port com-
missioners say they are concerned about
dockworker allegations of racial and gender
discrimination on the waterfront, but say
they have no jurisdiction over the
Longshoremen’s Union or the maritime
association that leases the docks from the
ports,” Holmes wrote.
In 1998, one of the Seattle-area suits
against the ILWU, the PMA and an array of
union locals – which, Holmes reported,
alleged Black and Hispanic workers were
“passed over for job assignments, subjected
to racial slurs and jokes, physically assault-
ed and, after the suit was filed 18 months
ago, victimized by retaliatory acts” — was
settled out of court.
By 2006 the African American Longshore
Coalition attempted reforms from inside the
union – but, some say, without result.
application Technicalities
A spokesman for the Tuesday help group
kicked off the session with a few words
about the need for more longshore workers
of color, and the need to fill out the
cards exactly right — without any
errors.
“The reason we brought you here
today is – you don’t have any better
opportunity than anybody else, but
you do have the opportunity to fill
out the card right and make sure
you’re in the drawing, and you may
possibly get a job as a longshore-
man,” he told the boisterous crowd.
the Skanner news was not able to identi-
fy the volunteer by press time because the
number of interested applicants at the coffee
shop was so large it was impossible to get
near the table. The throng surged out as far
as the parking lot and promised to keep
flowing until the event shut down at 3 p.m.
Wednesday is the deadline for sending in
Bigger Picture
“The problem is that when you look at
that economic system in the breakdown of
this city, people are tending to get the jobs
that their fathers have taught them,” Raiford
said Tuesday at Reflections. “So
without that opportunity we know
that we have a lot of unemployed
people, we have a lot of kids that
aren’t graduating from high school,
we have a lot of families that are
divided.
Raiford noted that most of the
families in Oregon today are
descendants of longshore workers
who came to Oregon at the begin-
ning of World War II.
“All of our families, including mine, came
to Portland with the longshoreman jobs
almost 100 years ago, so it shouldn’t be this
hard to get them into these types of oppor-
African American workers have
for years charged that the PMA
and the ILW keep jobs away from
women and workers of color
Workers Union Local 8 committee periodi-
cally selects new union members when
opportunities open up.
“There’s not many brothers with us down
there at the Port of Portland,” the volunteer
said. “So we have 500 longshoremen and
maybe 25-30 African American or mixed
race etcetera.
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Smith
continued from page 1
postpone his announcement. He simply did-
n’t make a speech, which is a shame
because he has plenty to say.
“The first thing to understand is that this
city doesn’t work because it has a great
mayor; this city works because it is a great
city,” he says. “Anyone who runs, promis-
ing that they are the answer, is asking the
wrong question!
“Portland is at its strongest when there are
a lot of Portlanders engaged in rising to our
challenges and creating opportunities for
the city. That’s what makes Portland spe-
cial.”
What makes Smith special? For one thing
he is the only mayoral candidate, so far,
with his own Wikipedia page. His entry
reveals that he is the great, great, great
If elected Smith would
be the first Portland
mayor to live in East
Portland a grassroots
jobs strategy is top of
his list
nephew of Joseph Smith, who founded the
Mormon religion. A graduate of Grant High
School, the University of Oregon and
Harvard Law School, in 2001, Jefferson
Smith also founded a revolutionary new
organization: the Oregon Bus Project.
Where old-style Democrats went to meet-
ings, the Bus Project took its progressive
political message on the road, signing up
hundreds of new voters -many of them peo-
ple of color –and injecting humor into poli-
tics with events such as, ‘Candidates Gone
Wild’. Elected in 2008 to represent East
Portland in Salem, Smith took that sense of
humor with him, somehow managing to get
his fellow Democrats to work together to
“Rick Roll’ the Oregon House of
Representatives. The Skanner News Video:
Rick Rolling the House
You Can’t Segregate Poverty
Now, Smith says he wants the mayor’s job
because local government is best placed to
solve the serious challenges facing neigh-
borhoods in East Portland, and across the
entire city.
“I listened to what my neighbors were
facing and I realized how little of that I
could impact in the Legislature, and how
much more it related to local government:
sidewalks, paving streets, the equitable dis-
tribution of resources; gang intervention;
safety on MAX platforms and the develop-
ment of our local economy.
“The MAX line runs through the whole
city and the economy of the entire city is
linked, from our businesses to our cus-
tomers. So for our city to work, the
WHOLE city needs to work.”
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September 21, 2011 The Portland Skanner Page 3