we are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning christian by for christian by face is executive director of the washington fair trade coalition and we're going to talk about the transpacific partnership t p p christine thank you very much for coming in spend a dime of this is morning thanks so much for having us mike and covering this important issue so start out tell us a bit about the washington fair trade coalition the washington go to a coalition is based here in washington state and made up of sixty six labor social justice environmental faith family farm fair trade businesses and student organizations working for an equitable global trading policy and we're connected nationally with his in straight campaigns and other state affiliates and public citizen and when to do when to jorgen ization come about we've been around officially as an organization for about seven years but we really came out of the people shutdown of the day in ninety nine and even prior to that ad hoc league groups were getting together to fight against nafta to organize around the and then to fight against cafe and then there was a recognition these free trade agreements keep coming with the same broken model and that we need to have a dedicated organization here in washington state that's tracking educating folks as well as advocating for what we want to see in trade agreements which is you know workers rights human rights environmental protections all the things that our communities value here in washington state very good so tell us about the trans pacific partnership what is the sure so the transpacific partnership is a free trade agreement it started back in the bush administration and was put on hold when obama first came into office and then he picked it up after the first year of his administration and so it's been an active negotiation for the past four years now it involves twelve countries initially it involved nine but in the last couple years other countries have joined it is pacific rim and so the countries it involves  canada the us mexico peru chile australia new zealand brunei malaysia vietnam and japan and it actually has a clause in it that allows other countries to join and so any country that's a pacific rim country either during the negotiations or even after the negotiations have been concluded could potentially join on to this agreement which makes it very unusual our other trade agreements such as nafta and have to are bound no other countries can join on and it has been probably one of the most secretive trying to go she asians that we've seen and so to be able to tell your listeners the content we have relied mostly on leaked texts because as these negotiations have happened behind closed doors from what we understand there are twenty nine chapters we're not even given the titles of all the chapters there when we think about trade agreements it's the flow of goods and services and wanting to enable there to be a more easy flow of goods and services and while a couple of the chapters do focus on the elimination of tariffs so that corporations can have access to markets the majority are around rewriting global laws and extending intellectual property rights enabling corporations to have even more global rights actually the folks that have unlimited access to the tax there are about six hundred corporations that have access to the tax and are involved actively in the goshi asians and they're the ones that you might imagine the wal marts the monsanto's the big banks and it's being negotiated with within the executive branch so u s t r which is the u s trade representative's office are the chief negotiators and actually many of the negotiators come from the corporate world and so we're seeing corporations at the table both representing the interests of the u s as well as a corporation and their own at global entities being at the table actually in our in our minds privatizing public policy so in addition to the executive branch are there any other government representatives  the one has access to well actually under the u s constitution congress has the rights and the responsibilities of regulating foreign commerce and so we have been reaching out to our elected officials because the tempus their partnership for it to be complete has to be voted on by congress and we have been reaching out to our elected officials to ask to get the tax because they have much more power than we do we elect them into office and just recently they have they u s t r has made it easier for members of congress to access the tax it's been very difficult there were all sorts of premiers put on congress they had to you know be in a certain room and they couldn't release it to their staffers i'll sorts of primaries that made it very hard for very busy lawmakers to be able to access what's really been going on however what u s t r has asked for is for congress to give them the power to complete these negotiations by giving them fast track authority and basically what fast track authority means is they give their constitutional power over to the executive branch and as we know we've only elected one person into the elected into the executive branch and the president obama where we have all of our elected officials in congress that we have voted to represent us and so we have been reaching out to our congress members here in washington state saying we want you to pledge to vote no on fast track and keep your authority until you see the text because many of them haven't seen the tax they don't even know what they are voting on and so we say keep your authority see the tax and negotiate talk about what what needs to be in these tax on behalf of workers what kinds of protections need to be in there what how would this benefit our community and if you can tell us definitively that this will benefit the majority of people in washington state and not just the corporate interests than then support it but until you absolutely know that you cannot give away your authority so has the executive branch are they currently trying to seek fast track authority from congress they are they actively are and that's why there actually has been some members of congress that have been reaching out and particularly represent him in german here and washington state has provided a lot of leadership in saying he will not support fast track and right now he will not support that transpacific partnership and is that just is that a majority vote that would allow authority gave us now and fast track authority gave us cafe and after twenty years of nafta seeing the loss of jobs and the promise is really unfulfilled because back twenty years ago we were promised a lot and similarly were promised a lot with a transpacific partnership it will be job creating it will help stabilize economies around the world that will promote high labor standards it will promote high environmental standards and twenty years of evidence has shown that that has actually not been the case and so we really want to be able to look at each of these chapters and have congress to be able to influence them in the process because what we've realized also with free trade agreements is that the power we have is in the negotiating process once they've been put into effect we have really very little power to amend them or change them in any way despite promises my real remember back on the campaign trail in two thousand and eight candidate obama and candidate clinton were talking about how nafta has failed us right right in detroit talking about the loss of automotive jobs and saying we need to renegotiate this and we're seeing that c p p as this back door renegotiation at the end of last year canada and mexico joins so really making this the supersized version of enough to nafta plus nine countries and what we are seeing is not a renegotiation not a twenty first century trade agreement but actually a lot of the same old stuff that's extending the rights of corporate personhood because under our trade agreements under nafta and under hafta there's a there's a chapter that corporations to be equal to countries and so if they don't like the rules of a country if they don't like the labor standards the environmental standards they can actually sue that country to change those labor standards and we have been seeing over the course of nafta twenty years corporations getting bolder and bolder and how they are using now to really fight the hard fought regulations that communities are working on right now communities here in washington state there's a reason egregious example of communities in quebec that work very hard to put a pause on fracking because they wanted to study the impacts of fracking to their water sources and there is a company and originally the company seems to hail from the u s it's called lone pines and it has a headquarters in delaware but if you look a little closer the company actually is out of alberta so this is a canadian company that is using nafta to sue their own country because they want to change a law that a community has put in place not even a law actually just a mor so we are very concerned that people here are working on you know labeling of g m o foods i mean that's an issue that we're going to be voting on in november or looking at issues of climate change and how to put legislation in place and one of the concerns is that our trade agreements kenny road those hard fought victories in other sectors and so the trade agreements very much dig deep and i'm just talking about what's happening here in north america and there's been huge resistance throughout throughout north america throughout south america but also throughout asia australia and new zealand so this also sounds very similar to  structures that the w t o brought us world trade organization so i drew it very very similar and in fact because of the people shut down in ninety nine what we had been seeing up until now are these smaller kind of bi lateral trade agreements because the round in seattle was never able to conclude and it was an example of corporations overreaching of trying to bring together many countries and getting them to agree to standards around you know the rights of big agro the rights of pharmaceutical companies and so they kind of circled around and realized well actually we're not going to be able to do this in one fell swoop and so we're going to create these bilateral trade agreements and we've seen them with colombia we've seen them with panama we've seen them with south korea and this is another attempt to be able to create an umbrella set of rules and regulations that are codify by corporations and that a number of different countries are going to have to abide by them and it's making countries open up their markets even further to corporate interests and that's where we see resistance right we're seeing resistance in malaysia public health organizations in malaysia are taking to the streets because of epidemic and thailand started producing its own anti retrovirals generic and try retroviral is that people who are living on a couple dollars a day could actually afford that public health systems could actually provide for their people and we're looking at seeing in a roshan of those global health advancements and so activists in malaysia have been taking to the streets there was just a a tepee round of negotiations in malaysia and july and people were arrested because this is literally people's lives and what we're seeing and what actually represented my german has been so important important in this struggle is that communities and africa rely on the generic medicines that generic anti retro virals that are being produced in asia and i know myself and many people here in this country rely on generic medicines it's what a lot of health insurance plans are able to support and so while we think research and innovation and development is very important we also feel that pharmaceutical companies are are making enough money and making enough profits on the patent to drugs and that that they are using this as an opportunity to extend their patents to change their formulations a little bit and create a whole new patent and that this is actually going to impact global health and we've seen groups like medicine self doctors without borders have said that they rely on generic medicines to be able to do the global relief and health work that they do and that these are taxpayer dollars that go into these global health programs that will just not be able to go as far  pharmaceutical companies have their way and again they're using the transpacific partnership and the fact that majority of people don't know what's happening as we're talking to people when people hear about what's going on just similarly with  o similarly with nafta when you poll people on whether nafta has been good for the u s three quarters of people say nolens been bad for the economy it's been bad for the creation of jobs it's only created poverty wage jobs and we've lost living wage family wage jobs and so that's a a big effort is to let people know about the trans pacific partnership so that they can be reaching out to their elected officials and saying this doesn't represent us because it will really impact us it will impact us as eaters around what's in our food and labeling requirements impact us as workers it will only extend the wal mart is ation that we've been facing the creation of poverty wage jobs where people are working full time and are still relying on government assistance programs because they can't support their family on minimum wage jobs it will support us it will impact us as members of community that value healthy community we've fought for you know water safety standards and standards for air and you know what pollutants are allowed into our communities and it will also impact us as people because corporations are getting more and more rights and people are getting less and less rights on this planet you know you previously mentioned both clinton and obama talking about the devastation to detroit that was prior to detroit declaring bankruptcy you're sticking with the example you were just talking about with  generics and other countries relying on those so the t t the t p p would in fact from what we know would allow these  pharmaceutical companies to extend their patents in twenty year leaps is that correct yes is it exactly or as they talked about being able to report and things by just sort of changing the  a small formula in in the drug also for countries like canada new zealand and australia that have a government supported health system they rely on being able to negotiate tough negotiations with pharmaceutical companies and so pharmaceutical companies are looking at this as an opportunity and i should say also japan japan coming in there was huge resistance to japan coming at a small a small rally in japan a six thousand people and so they have had people on the streets and in addition to i'm concern around farming commodities one of the other concerns is around the government supported health system in japan they have an incredible system where the average japanese person has access to really cutting edge medicines and why many communities people in the region go to japan for health care because it's quite extraordinary and so there's a concern that governments will be absolutely depleted and they won't be able to provide the same if they're if they're needing to provide these very expensive drugs to their communities they will be providing less of it and it will really erode really these bipartisan systems because in these countries it's not political right health care is not political in a political issue it is seen as a human rights issue in those communities and so pharmaceutical companies have been looking for ways to get into these countries and also to say on on the other on the other health side philip morris has been looking for ways to fight labeling and new zealand and australia have very aggressive labeling on their cigarette packages and they're using this as a way to say this is a barrier to trade because right it all comes down to you this is a barrier trade and if you are impacting our profits corporate america or corp global corporations they're based in america but they're not they're not actually our corporations but if you're impacting our profits you don't get to do that even if our product has been proven to be harmful to your public and so it is really just turning common sense on into ear of what we as communities get to advocate for and what countries get to advocate for and and so that's why we feel that we need to have huge public opinion being put forward on this to say no i care about the health of my community and i don't want to see a road ahead on the backs i don't want profits being on the backs of my community and my understanding is and when these corporations sue when they want one of these laws change in the law the country sticks to their guns so to speak the corporation sues for perceived or potential profits not even actual damages this is what we could have made had we sold these cigarettes to your children and now you have to give us x number of millions of dollars in return yeah there was a  recent case that just settled and you should say i have clarified the court's we're talking about are not domestic courts they're not the courts that you and i have access to they're actually these arbitration tribunals and they're being overseen by the world bank and what happens is there are three arbitrators and these are not judges these are attorneys and sometimes they represent the country and sometimes they represent the corporation and they go back and forth this is their profession and the country gets to pick one the corporation gets to pick one and they mutually decide on another and there's no parameters of what they can decide they can compel the country to change their law and as you say they can assess any amount of damage that they want and so there was a recent case of cargill suing the country of mexico because mexico put a very high tariff on high fructose corn syrup which you know has been proven to be a  public health devastation also mexico trying to protect their corn industry mexico the birthplace of corn and they have been seeing erosion of that industry by dumping and they were awarded ninety five million dollars mexico last pay ninety five million dollars to cargo and this is despite huge profits that cargo has reaped in the twenty years of nafta in mexico and so we're seeing  said bolder and bolder cases there was another case of a canadian mining corporation and pacific as a canadian corporation and they were in el salvador and they were doing some test my testing we all know central america very rich in minerals gold and so they found gold deposits in el salvador husing very very invasive drilling techniques where they had to infuse water at very high pressure using huge amounts of water from the main watershed in el salvador and leaving behind a wake of chemicals selenium arsenic all sorts of things you do not want in your water source and through enormous pressure and life lost in el salvador the government said actually we're revoking your permits you don't actually get to be doing any more mining and so this is a canadian subsidiaries so they could sue and they sued them not only for their an initial investment but these through them for potential profits so it's hundreds of millions of dollars and thank goodness that lawsuit was actually thrown out but pacific rim is not stopping and they're looking for other ways to be able to get in there to take out gold and so they can sell it for their own profits not benefiting the people of el salvador at all and for people who know the history of el salvador know el salvador is  you know been struggling to create a stable community after many many years of armed conflict and so they don't have the resources to be able to pay country companies for the loss of their potential profits it's just absolutely ridiculous and goes against the things we value and in that particular instance it would be the government and the people of el salvador that we're paying just for the legal fees to try and keep these this company out absolutely and so that's a situation that is the taxpayers that are paying because you know for example with this suit the fracking suit it's quite back that has the moratorium but the company seems canada and so the country has to decide whether they're going to take on that suit and as you said it's very expensive they have to use taxpayer dollars it's millions of dollars and they may win they may not win and so what might happen is you know the canadian government right now under harper my you know very perceive that with the current push towards restricting the amount of carbon that goes into an atmosphere here in white in washington state with against the coal trains things like that  this agreement would see that as a restriction on trade and could potentially stop any laws that were enacted with that correct absolutely and in the conversations around you know carbon tax in different creative solutions  we need to be jointly working on trade because our trade agreements can really reach down into so many environmental and social justice regulations and challenge them and and we're seeing it you know around fracking and what's what's driving the fracking industry it's the the cost of natural gas and it's it's really looking at you know they say follow the money and it's looking out well the cost of natural gas the prices of natural gas are incredibly high in  southeast asia and japan and so that's the market that fracking corporations would have access to natural gas isn't such a hot commodity here it's not i think the cost is you know a few dollars here or in japan it's you know five times that and so a lot again it's really challenging you know here we need trade agreements because we need jobs but we really need to challenge what are the quality of those jobs and we talk about the need for  because we need to be energy independent but really is it about energy independence or is it really about profits for energy companies globally and really challenging these promises and the we have twenty years of evidence of nafta of of a lot of promises that well not only were they not felt but they just were untrue and so really challenging listeners that when they're hearing these sound bites about why we need to be doing these things we need to question who who's who's saying these things and really points to the amount of corporate dollars in our political system and so when we're hot hearing our elected leaders saying these are the things we need we need to look at who is backing those leaders and that is really corporate interests that are they're contributing to political campaigns they're writing our trade agreements they're the ones that are pushing down standards and that we really need to be questioned not in our communities and reminding our elected leaders that ultimately we are electing them and we can choose not to elect and they are not doing their jobs if they don't represent us if they are representing the corporations so how can people find out more about this issue so encourage people to go to our website washington fairtrade dot au our g something i didn't mention another website is t p p x border so it's just a letter x border dot org and this is a group of activists in canada the u s and mexico that are linking the different issues throughout the continent and on there there's a trying to national unity letter encourage folks to reach out to their elected officials on fast track because that will be coming up in the next month and so just simply telling the elective are legit officials to pledge no vote no on fast track but that's all on our website and they can take a look at that and also be reaching out to local media outlets we really do appreciate covering it today and that's been one of the big struggles is getting mainstream media to cover this issue because we feel very confident when people know what's going on they'll be outraged they'll be people in the streets and it's starting to mike we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning jen marlowe and holly ballard jen marlowe is an award winning documentary filmmaker author playwright and human rights activist she is the co director of a life in the balance examining the troy davis case a four part video series for amnesty international she's also the author of the new book i am troy davis coauthored with toure a sister martina davis correa holy ballard is the outreach coordinator  we do have actually lawmakers in all four caucuses that have the part of death penalty repeal so we are well on our way to seeing this legislative effort go forward we are concerned primarily for a number of reasons about the death penalty including the fact that it's a staggering cost to taxpayers so two thousand and six washington state bar study estimated that the death penalty cases cost on average and vishal eight hundred thousand dollars per case and taxpayers are out nearly seven million dollars on that you thousands of incarnation case alone which has yet to even go to trial and we're also concerned about an essence one hundred forty two people have been exonerated from death row as a cost across the country sent nine hundred seventy three and so that really makes you wonder how many more we've missed that penalty obviously is irreversible and that there's a serious concern about that as well as fairness the death penalty is really arbitrarily up applied across across the spectrum from says through economic backgrounds to people of color and even to the county in which the crime happened so pierce county actually seeks the death penalty twice as often as king county even for similar crimes because of the lack of resources in king county and other counties across the state that just can't afford to seek the death penalty so the idea that the death penalty is reserved for the worst of the worst is really an erroneous idea because the fact is the resource resources just aren't there across the state and this is sort of symptomatic of trends nationwide and jan what was your motivation in writing your new book i am tr us how did you get involved in the well the motivation came from my growing relationship with troy davis and with his family and that began troy by the time the state of georgia finally succeeded in executing troy which was on september twenty first two thousand and eleven that had actually been their fourth attempt the first time they tried to kill joy his first execution date was in july two thousand and seven and he survived that execution date by twenty three hours and the day after that i heard his sister martina speak on democracy now and i heard martina talking about her fight to prove her brothers in a sense and also the double struggle that she was fighting for her own life she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer six years before that so she'd been fighting for her own life at the same time that she was fighting for her brother's life and she was so clearly a force of nature it made me curious about this brother who is in a sense she was fighting to prove i hadn't heard anything about choice case at that point and i began to do research online a quickly uncovered the report that amnesty international had put out a few months earlier which was which was put out in february two thousand and seven called where is the justice for me and all the facts about choice case were just laid out in empirical black and white the fact that there was never any physical evidence that linked him to the murder of the police officer for which he had been convicted and sentenced to death the fact that the only evidence used against him were eyewitness testimony and that seven out of the nine key witnesses later recanted their testimony many saying that they had been coerced and intimidated by the police and implicating troy so it seems so clearly a travesty of justice and i just found a website with choices address in prison in that research and i wrote him a card and we began a correspondence he actually suggested to me that i make a documentary film about his sister martina when he learned i was a filmmaker and then when i met martina it was she came to seattle in two thousand and nine for a speaking of  martina i actually was the one who mentioned she said people keep telling me that i should write a book but i would need someone to work with me on it because i don't have time to to write a book myself and a can get the idea out of my mind partly because troy had already planted that se when he had suggested that i make a film about martina and so and at that point choi and i had already been corresponding for a couple of years and we'd started talking on the phone and i was getting closer to him and i wanted to do whatever i could to help to help  get free and to help expose his case so i asked martina if she would want me to be that person to work with her on the project and and she said yes and we began and you actually ended up meeting him in person a couple times several times so the first time i met troy was soon after martine and i made the decision to work on the book together i made my first of many trips to savannah and i went with martina and the entire davis family to visit troy on george's death row and that was my first visit and it was a really profound experience you go to george's death row you go to any you know maximum security prison and you're just you're surrounded with concrete and barbed wire and guard towers and and it's pretty extraordinary when you're sitting in the midst of that and to see that davis family transformed that into wound and love and humanity choice humanity was so clear his dignity his love for his family the family's faith their devotion to each other it was able to transform concrete and barbed wire and troy and i actually during that first visit we devised a system where he too could contribute to the book and so a lot of the book there's a lot of the book that comes directly from troy we devised a system through letters and through phone calls  where i would cause that the authorities in the prison system in georgia what have created trouble for troy if they knew he was working on writing a book and so we devised a system where and every letter i wrote him i would just plant a question or two  understand was for the book so i would write him a letter and say well try love to hear about some of your earliest childhood memories and then he would write me pages and pages of those memories with the understanding that that would be used in the book and so so i was able to visit tori many times and we became closer and closer and actually the last time i visited choi was the day before his execution he was able to put a list of i think it's around twenty people who are permitted to go and say goodbye so  know there's so many things about this stripped and process of state killing that's so barbaric and the idea that you have to come up with your list of people that are going to come and say goodbye to you so i was able to go and be one of the people to say goodbye to troy the day before the state of georgia ultimately killed him in in your e mails to me you called this the death penalty system you talk about how this system impacted choice family and other families absolutely i think there are so many invisible victims of the death penalty system that we don't that we're not accustomed to thinking about i think were accustomed to thinking about the condemned prisoner himself and there's a lot of attention that's often put on what was his last meal request and what were his or her last words but we don't think of the innocent families that get ground up in this death penalty system which of course includes the family of the condemned prisoner the you know so choice family choice family has paid an enormous price of suffering due to due to the fact that you know there are decades long struggle to try to save choi and and the fact that death and dying were constantly hanging over their heads troy's death and dying but there's also the families of the murder victims who many of whom have spoken out and talked about how the death penalty not only doesn't meet their needs but but in many ways the death penalty prolongs their trauma and prolongs their pain because because the case gets dragged out for years and years often for decades because resources that could be spent on victims services resources that could be spent really helping families are instead spent on the death penalty so there's many many family members of murder victims who have stood up to say we don't want the death penalty it's you know it doesn't it hurts us it doesn't help us and other invisible victims are our the our the state employees our government employees who are tasked with the job of killing prisoners we often don't think about the executioners themselves and the ones who have reported having nightmares where the people that they have executed are gathered around the people after heard of wardens talk after an execution that they're that they're staying up all night vomiting it is deepening and extending trauma all around and it's not solving anything the death penalty doesn't make community safer it is not a deterrent studies have shown that the death penalty the only need it possibly answers is a sort of a visceral need for vengeance and i don't believe a justice system should be should be rooted visceral need for revenge i mean not for justice of a sarong need for retaliation and revenge i think a justice system should not be based on this visceral need for revenge i think a justice system should be based on meeting community needs and making the community safer and stronger and the death penalty it detracts from and as you mentioned the both troy and the family having to go through four basically stays there was four different execution dates so choice family had to prepare to say good bye to him four different times and two thousand and seven which was the first execution date that execution was stayed twenty three hours in advance his second execution date which was september two thousand and eight that execution came within ninety minutes of its scheduled time so choice family had already said goodbye to him they were in the prison yard holding vigil waiting to see if this execution was going to proceed his third execution date got stage three days in advance and then the fourth execution date was when they were ultimately successful choi's mother ended up passing away just months before the fourth execution date that ultimate execution and she passed away it was exactly two weeks after the u s supreme court had denied choice final appeal which was what paved the way for the state of georgia to set that final execution date virginia davis had gone to the doctor the day before that had been given a clean bill of health and the next day her grandson troy's nephew martina sunday john came home couldn't wake up she had killed over in her chair the doctors doing a pulling our autopsy found no discernible cause of death no signs of heart attack no signs of stroke or her death certificate said natural causes but martina came out and said there is nothing natural about dying of heartbreak because you can and or your son's fourth execution date so that again that's part of what i mean when i talk about the price that the death penalty wreaks on innocent families holy can you talk about that a bit more i believe in your website you have former wardens that are against the  do we have a couple of individuals who have either previously or currently involved in working in the justice system norm stamper and dick morgan have both come out in opposition to the death penalty the toll that it takes on as john mentioned the officials on the families of murder victims is just tremendous and i think ultimately there are so many staggering reasons to repeal the death penalty that the ultimate reason vengeance is just not it's not that it's not relevant or it doesn't have merit i mean for some people i think for victims of these horrible crimes their need for justice is real and there's never a time when we look at a horrific crime and say oh well it's not a big deal or that we're discounting the pain but as john mentioned it turns out that the death penalty often pro longs that pain for victim's family members and so so many of them are part of our coalition to say we need to repeal the death penalty because this policy is not working for us and ultimately it's not you know justice should be swift and it should be sure and the death penalty is neither it takes many years if somebody is that correct cupid at all and the toll of that takes on again the prison officials the family members of both the exit condemned prisoner and victims families is just really tremendously outweighs any sort of value i think in retribution of justice we could much easier put someone in prison with life without parole save millions of extra dollars that could be going into other justice programs that could be going into victims family services for example king county just last year closed our cold case unit and at the end of two thousand and twelve for lack of funding so there are all of these family members that are still sitting around hoping to know what happened to their loved ones and they may never find out and if we could reroute this funding that we are wasting on the death penalty and ineffectual policy that as john mentioned is not a deterrent we know that in fact crime rates in homicide rates are actually higher in states that have the death penalty even in states that don't so we could reroute those funds into services that make more sense for an overall more just society as opposed to continuing to push forward with an ineffectual policy that is just not working for washington's taxpayers it's not working for washington's victims families it's not working for folks in the system and it's not  has been named by many other witnesses is one of the two witnesses who did not were camped and he is the man he and sure were both at the scene of the crime when police officer mark macphail was murdered and this other man sylvester red coals is the one who went to the police the next day and gave them troy davis name and from that point on the investigation had tunnel vision on trolling and on choi alone and so this other man sylvester red coals was never investigated as a suspect even though it later emerged that he was seen carrying with him the very same caliber of gun that had been used in the murder of officer macphail and that other witnesses said later said that coles had confessed to them and several other witnesses came forward and said they actually had witnessed this manacles pull the trigger but i think one of the things that choice case exposes about our justice system is that it often is not actually concerned about truth it's concerned about procedure and process it prioritizes finality over fairness so by the time these recantations came forward and these new testimonies came forward choi had already missed critical windows in his hey b s process and his appeals process and it was considered it was considered too late so the idea that troy had serious claims of innocence was it was just dismissed because the focus was on you know after time appeal after appeal the focus was on procedure and process not on fairness and truth choi eventually did get in and given everything get an evidentiary hearing the u s supreme court finally did order that in two thousand and nine in the  burden of proof shifted so it was on choice to prove innocence he had to have to prove innocence and that's an enormously challenging legal standard because twenty years after trial when some witnesses have died other witnesses memories have gone stale it was never any physical evidence so there's nothing for d n a to conclusively scientifically prove in choice case and that's true in many other murder cases d n a is just the tip of the iceberg and you know in terms of being able to prove innocence so how how in those circumstances how do you prove a negative how do you prove an essence and that the federal judge that was appointed to try his case determined that troy did not prove innocence he did admit in his ruling that the case against choice was not armed clad yet he said that jury did not prove innocence even though when you look at the evidence that had been used against troy at trial whatever flimsy case there was against troy a trial it had all unraveled by then the judge determined that was not proving innocence measured menton that as we're talking about appeals a lot of folks when we talk about the cost of the death penalty think and i used to think actually that the appeals process is where the majority of those costs come from that's not actually true so as john mentioned by the time that someone has gotten through their first trial and has gone usually to their habeas as they move forward through the system ultimately with troy ending up u s supreme court those costs are there but so much of the costs actually come in the original of the pretrial and then the original trial phases and that's because the standard has to be it's necessarily higher in death penalty cases than a non death penalty case is to make sure that we don't make a mistake but as i mentioned one hundred forty two people have been executed from death row in the united states since one nine hundred seventy three so those are just the cases that we know about where we got it wrong and we're able to release those people from death row before they were executed but we have this tremendous you know a friend of mine likes to say frequently that the system itself with the laws actually should work but we have human beings operating a system and therefore is there only as in the sense that many times they feel that from the police to the prosecutor still pressure to put someone in prison to get sort of to look tough on crime and to make the people in the communities feel safer and so what we end up with is  oftentimes sort of if not completely invented then sort of certainly twisted evidence in an original trial and as many safeguards as there are within the justice system we still get it wrong but we certainly can't sort of streamline that system because then we run the risk of getting it wrong even more often right and they're trying to streamline it right now in florida and florida there's legislation that's being debated called the timely justice act which is basically an attempt to fast track the death penalty and like cali's mentioned there's one hundred forty two people we've exonerated from death row how many of them would have ended up actually being executed being exonerated post to miss lee if a fast track system had been in place we know we've executed innocent people in this country troy is just one of many innocent people that we have executed and any attempt to fast track the process will only guarantee that we will execute even more innocent people than we are already at risk of and so if we know that that's the case then the only logical alternative is to repeal the death penalty we can't streamline the process without risking innocent lives and we can't afford to continue to spend millions of extra dollars on a system that doesn't work for freddy lee pitts is one of those one hundred forty two men who have been exonerated from death row and freddie lee pitts once said you can always release a wrongfully convicted man from prison you can never really some from the grave  just about seven minutes left i want to make sure we get to you john with the actual reading how many people are currently on death row in the u s do we know well here in washington state i believe there's nine there are nine and i should mention that four of those are african americans that's the quick snapshot into the racial disparity that we see not only in washington but across the country and actually i don't know the statistic nationwide i'd have to i would have to look that up but but of course california is the largest death row in the country i think something like twenty percent of all death row inmates in the united states are in california and you know you look at the other big execution executing states such as texas virginia you know there's a there's a  lot of people on the road with their life on the line in fact we just a study just came out recently that showed that the majority of executions in the country are conducted in earth thought at least in two percent of counties so again that's a reminder that it really depends on the resources of each county to determine whether somebody whether they will seek the death penalty and that really is over represented in places like think like california and texas and it sounds like also the politics that decide where the death penalty is being carried out was which was the supposed to be troy is first execution date it was the first execution date of the execution was ultimately avoided in this passage takes place when the family is waiting to hear what decision the georgia do you feel how do i feel about what about troy stay what stay the poor old board gave troy a ninety day stay of execution martina threw the phone down and began to leap around the hotel room choy got to stay tr got to stay she screamed just then mom a cell phone rang virginia punched through the numbers as quickly as she could so that she could hear choice voice hi mama had the hear and go to junior put her cell phone on speaker so tori could hear martina who is still dancing and singing a bowling alley you hear of at honey the family huddled around virginia's cell phone to hear trailers reaction for a moment there was silence then and almost an audible thank you god followed by another thank you god this time a little louder troy did something that he did regularly choi prayed then he did something he almost never did troy began to cry warden terry verified the news of the stay and two guards led troy from the death house back to his cell block fellow death lorry death row inmates lined up at the doors of their cells extending their arms through the iron bars to grasp tro hand as you walk down the row praise god brother one man called out to him tears in his eyes maybe at least one of us will survive this place another cheered troy's friends shoved small items through the bars for him to take back items that choi had bequeathed to them the previous day a bottle of shampoo some extra stamps a few avel ups his belt and shoes troy had high and a new spring in a step walked into his cell he heard the familiar klein of the cell door locking behind him but at that moment he was not focused on his confinement he was focused on his life georgia had intended to take it from him in less than twenty four hours he and his family and scores of supporters had fought and they had effort to bring down the death penalty in the last two years and i think that a lot of that is because of troy and because of how deeply disturbed people were when they saw that that state governments were so comfortable proceeding with execution when there was a mountain of evidence pointing to the persons and a sense since tori's execution two more states have abolished the death penalty connecticut and maryland actually maryland just signed that into law on october first a few days ago u s support for the death penalty gallup has shown that that weeks following tours execution gallup did a poll that showed that that was at a thirty nine year low u s support for the death penalty a lot of progress has been made and we have a lot of work to st still to do right right here in washington state that's right dan so we're in a really fortunate situation thanks so much to the work that folks have done on cases like troy's where we are in a situation of national momentum again the support for the penalty as it is at an all time low including here in washington people just don't support this policy anymore for all the reasons that we've talked about so last year just to give you a quick update on what's been happening with this legislation we are trying to do this as a legislative campaign in two thousand and twelve there was a hearing in the senate judiciary committee and then last year we had a hearing in the house judiciary committee so we're making really incremental progress toward getting a bill up for a vote which is great i mean i think we are continuing to get more support every year and the legislators are feeling more and more confident that their constituents care about this issue and do want to see the death penalty repealed