Remain Free: A Memoir

2016 Georgia Author of the Year Award Winner 2016 IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist 2016 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist2015 Foreword Reviews INDIEFAB Book of the Year Finalist I fight to live so you'll remain free. The year is 2011. Troy Anthony Davis, a black man convicted of murdering white police officer Mark MacPhail in cold blood, is the world's most famous death row inmate. In the twenty-two years since the murder, Davis had faced four execution dates. The day after one of those execution dates, a fifteen-year-old named Gautam Narula wrote Davis a letter.Virtually unknown four years earlier, Davis caught the world's attention when nearly every eyewitness recanted their testimony against him and new witnesses claimed another man confessed to the crime. Despite decades of appeals, worldwide protests, and over a million petitions, Troy Davis was executed by the state of Georgia on September 21, 2011. Americans across the country wondered: Did we just execute an innocent man? In this incisive, uncompromising memoir, Gautam Narula details his unlikely friendship with Troy Davis amid the politics and personalities of the Troy Davis movement. Drawing upon hundreds of recorded conversations, letters, and personal visits with Davis, Remain Free reveals intimate, previously unpublished details about the Troy Davis case and movement, including Davis's first-hand account of the night MacPhail was murdered; the harsh, brutal reality of life and death row; and the legal corruption and political maneuvering that sent Troy Davis to the execution chamber. A haunting, unabashed coming-of-age story amid a tragedy that remains all too relevant, Remain Free is a brutally honest expression of humanity existing in even the darkest of places. Publisher's Note: All author and publisher profits will be donated to the Innocence Project, a non-profit that exonerates wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing.