My Visit With Troy Davis, a Man Facing Death on October 27th

***UPDATE: On October 24, Troy Davis was granted a stay of execution. Go here for more information.***

October 23rd is a Global Day of Action for Troy Davis. Go here for more information.

They come out of the corridor all dressed up, with perfectly ironed white suits with blue collars and tennis shoes, a white smile upon their shaved faces. It is visiting day, and they have been waiting for it since last week.

They lean in a line against the yellow painted gates with their arms straight out, waiting for the warden to release their handcuffs, and then they dissolve in the crowded room filled with kids and antsy wives who offer them prepackaged foods just purchased from the vending machines in the hall -- their gourmet lunch for the day.

But Troy Davis is not allowed in the visitation room with the rest of them because he is a death row inmate. Visitors see him in a separate room, two gates away from where others greet guests.

Inside the prison, he is known by the number 657378, since the day he was confined to cell 79 on the top floor of the G-house in the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Ga. He was convicted for the murder of a police officer when he was 20 years old. He has always said he is innocent.

Davis has been sitting on Georgia's death row for 17 years, charged with the assault of Larry Young, a homeless man, and the murder of police officer Mark Allen MacPhail in the parking lot of a Burger King in Savannah, Ga. on August 19, 1989. Seven of the nine eyewitnesses who testified that Davis was present at the shooting have recanted their testimony, saying police pressured them into making false statements. Their recantations have never been heard in court. No weapon has ever been found, and no physical evidence connects Davis to the crime.

After years of litigation, Davis exhausted his appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court in March 2008 when the court denied him an evidentiary hearing. He was denied clemency from the Georgia Pardons and Paroles Board on Sept. 8, 2008. His appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was not considered until Sept. 23, when the court convened an emergency session and gave Davis a stay less than two hours before his scheduled execution, due to the abundance of incongruent evidence in favor of his innocence.

The stay gave Davis and his many supporters new hope. But on Oct. 14, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to give Davis's case a full hearing, leaving the lower court verdict intact. A new death warrant was issued few days later and a third execution date is scheduled for Oct. 27 at 7pm.

I met Davis inside the walls of the prison for the first time, when, after a two-month correspondence, I decided to fly to Jackson to talk to him in person. I wanted to know for myself how someone could sleep at night, knowing that death might soon be whispering in his ears for a crime he says he did not commit.

The answer was more powerful than I had expected.

"My faith has taught me that if you give all your worries to God he will carry your burdens," Davis wrote in a letter to me sent the day after my visit. "It's God that carried me through death's valley and took my worries away."

For Davis, faith is the door to freedom. Having faith makes you stronger than your family and able to support them more than they are supporting you, he said, because they are the ones who will be left behind once you are gone and you have to show them you are not afraid to die.

"Sometimes all of this seems like it's happening to someone else. I sometimes dream to be free, but in each dream my family is 18-and-a-half years younger, and my father is still alive," said Davis during an in-person interview in April 2008. "I am disappointed at the system, but refuse to become bitter and angry, because I still have a lot of fight left in me … I have too much to live for to give up, to give up on myself means I have given up on my family as well, but we are in this together and I cannot give up now."