CAT committee considers Mark MacPhail memorial
A review is underway by the Chatham Area Transit to determine whether it should create a memorial to honor slain Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail.
An ad hoc committee has been appointed by CAT board Chairman Pete Liakakis to investigate how the transit authority should respond to what board members say are mounting requests to memorialize MacPhail, whose death is inextricably linked to one of the nation's most controversial death penalty cases in recent memory.
A recommendation from the 3-member committee is expected when the board meets on April 15.
Liakakis says he hopes the pending recommendation from the committee will help resolve the issue that has been brewing over the past several months.
"We just set up the committee to make a recommendation so the board can vote on that right away," said Liakakis.
It's been nearly 25 years since MacPhail was gunned down while aiding a homeless man under assault near a downtown bus station while working off-duty. In August 1991, Troy Anthony Davis was convicted for the crime and put on death row.
The case, absorbed in racial overtones from the beginning, put Savannah at the epicenter of the firey debate over the death penalty, one that garnered worldwide attention.
Celebrities, a former president and a pope were among those who seized upon unknown facts, such as a lack of physical evidence, to protest for clemency. Following multiple appeals and 3 stays of execution, Davis, who proclaimed innocence, was put to death by lethal injection in September 2011 at a prison in Jackson.
A ground swell of support for a MacPhail memorial began late last summer.
A Facebook page created around that time proposed a plaza memorial in tribute to MacPhail at CAT�s newly renovated West Oglethorpe Avenue headquarters, the site where the shooting occurred in August 1989. The page has more than 1,060 "likes," up from more than 360 in November.
Some members of the MacPhail family have expressed their support. Anneliese MacPhail did not respond to a call seeking her thoughts about a memorial honoring her son, a U.S. Army veteran.
Support for the cause caught the attention of some Chatham County commissioners, including Helen Stone, who also serves as a CAT board member. She introduced the idea for a memorial at the October 2013 CAT board meeting.
Just as back then, some board members continue to resist the idea. Like the public over the Davis case itself, the board appears divided.
Addressing the MacPhail memorial proposition could also not have come at a worse time for the transit authority.
The controversial matter finds CAT reeling from the defeat earlier this month of its legislative plan to extend transit services in west Chatham County, which followed the city of Savannah's brush-off of its downtown streetcar proposal and last year's unpopular tax hike - all measures aimed in part at finding revenue to become solvent.
In February, when the CAT ad hoc committee was created to come up with a potential resolution, board members again wrangled over the merits of erecting a memorial. Stone, Mary Osborne, a Savannah alderwoman, and Priscilla Thomas, a county commissioner, each volunteered to be on the committee.
Osborne and Thomas have questioned the suggestion of honoring an individual officer when a memorial honoring local fallen officers already exists in the Police Memorial Park across from Savannah-Chatham police headquarters on Oglethorpe Avenue. Honoring an individual officer, they've argued, could set an imprudent precedent.
According to minutes of the Feb. 18 board meeting, Osborne said that after speaking with the city and county managers she planned to propose a tree memorial, which could be expanded and for which funding is available, to honor all those who have fallen in the line of duty.
But board member James Holmes, a county commissioner, has been an ardent critic of the idea. Consideration for a memorial, he said, should not even be given.
"This has never happened in this county or city in my life," he said at the February meeting. "And all of the sudden you are going to go back and dig up concern. Look, you all are barking upon something that should have never been brought to this group."
Others, however, said the matter has reached the point where it cannot be disregarded.
"I do think we have to deal with this. All of us have gotten emails, all of us have been asked to have coffee with someone or lunch with someone or meet with someone to talk about this thing. It's just sort of hanging over our heads," said board member Bill Broker.
(source: Savannah Now)
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