Sunday, December 28, 2008 | News, Opinion, In this Issue...
2008’s Person of the Year

When Kim Zolciak is the only comic relief, you know SP is serious about its annual list of Georgians who merited headlines

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By Stephanie Ramage and Kevin Forrest Moreau

    Every December since 2005, The Sunday Paper has sorted through all the media coverage of Atlanta and Georgia over the preceding year and come up with a list of five people who garnered the lion’s share of attention. This year’s list, we admit, is more somber than its predecessors.

Not our fault. If we could have made the year’s press coverage a little more superficial, we would have.

This year, part of the list addresses what entertains us. Another concerns matters of life and death. And the final pick, the 2008 Person of the Year, transcends all of those.

KIM ZOLCIAK

“The Real Housewives of Atlanta” delivered the cable channel Bravo one of its biggest hits in recent memory, averaging 1.3 million viewers per episode to rack up the network’s best freshman series numbers since “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” in 2003. And it gave Atlanta a watercooler bonanza, with plenty of petty squabbles (NeNe Leakes’ rivalry with imperious diva Sheree Whitfield) and conspicuous consumption. But the most vital component of the show’s success was Kim Zolciak, the single mother of two whose relationship with a mysterious sugar daddy known only as “Big Poppa” sparked equal amounts of gossipy speculation and exasperation.

Leakes may have emerged as the show’s breakout star (and tabloid fixture, given her recent housing troubles), but it was Kim who kept us talking—and rolling our eyes. Who could forget her tacky wardrobe change in a gas station parking lot in the first episode? Her straight-faced assertion that she was 29 years old? Her sharing a bed with her two daughters way beyond the appropriate cut-off age?

And let’s not forget her, shall we say, ambitious country-music aspirations. How bad was her singing? After appearing on the show to offer advice, super-producer Dallas Austin publicly distanced himself from Zolciak, setting the record straight that he is not working with her on an album.

Kim’s mix of covetousness, connivance and cluelessness even drove the normally collected Lisa Wu Hartwell to rip into her castmate during the show’s reunion special.
Earlier this month, Bravo picked up the Atlanta “Housewives” for a second season. If they’re smart, the network brass will make securing Zolciak’s return their top priority.—K.F.M.

MATT RYAN

Last year at this time, the Atlanta Falcons were defeated, dispirited and all but broken. The Michael Vick dogfighting scandal had claimed the franchise’s star player. And Bobby Petrino, whose dour countenance and aloof coaching style did little to inspire confidence, bailed on the team with a 3-10 record and three games left to play in the season.

Today, the Falcons are 10-5 and playoff-bound. At press time, with one more regular-season game left to play, the possibility of a division championship hovers tantalizingly within reach. And amazingly, they sit on that lofty perch with a new general manager, a rookie head coach and a starting quarterback fresh out of college.

You can credit this miraculous turnaround to any number of folks, from owner Arthur Blank to General Manager Thomas Dimitroff to coach Mike Smith—even running back Michael Turner, who promptly broke the franchise’s single-game running record during his Falcons debut. But the lynchpin of the team’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes has inarguably been Matt Ryan.

The Boston College grad has been a model of poise throughout his inaugural NFL season, whether standing calmly in the pocket, looking for just the right opportunity to score, or enduring the disapproval of a skeptical fan base the moment he was plucked in the first round. Some griped that the Falcons should have picked Glenn Dorsey instead; others were just angry that his signing signaled a moving-on from the Vick era. When he won the starting role, sports-radio callers vented that he was too green for such an important job.

In spite of it all, Ryan has delivered, confidently leading his team to its first winning season in four years. And he’s given the Falcons something they needed just as badly: a new face. In any other year, his likeable persona, work ethic and grace under pressure, standing in such sharp contrast to the sullen, self-involved silence of the Vick and Petrino years, would cinch top Person of the Year honors. As it is, he’s given Atlanta a shot of pride, with a chaser of hope for the future.—K.F.M.

TROY DAVIS

In August 1989, Troy Davis, then 19 years old, was involved in the murder of an off-duty police officer at a bus station in Savannah. After a homeless man named Larry Young was pistol-whipped from behind, 27-year-old Officer Mark MacPhail, who was working a security job, chased Davis and two buddies, one of whom was a man named Sylvester Coles.

Witnesses said that MacPhail’s murderer stopped running, turned and fatally shot the young policeman. In short order, Davis was arrested, convicted of MacPhail’s murder and sentenced to death.

While Davis waited for his execution, seven of nine witnesses recanted their original testimony, saying they’d either been unsure at the time or had outright lied. Young, the homeless guy, said he wasn’t sure exactly who smacked him, which was important, because Davis was convicted in part by testimony that the person who hit Young was the same person who shot MacPhail.

Additionally, the gun used in the murder has never turned up, and a new witness claimed he saw Coles dump a gun following MacPhail’s killing. (Davis’ defense has pointed out that Coles’ photo wasn’t even included in the photo lineup presented to witnesses for identification.)

Yet, despite this array of questionable testimony and procedure, Davis—who was without any real legal representation in the critical period immediately following his conviction—has repeatedly been denied a new trial, and he has faced three execution dates: July 17, 2007; Sept. 23, 2008; and Oct. 27, 2008.

His sister, Martina Correia, who is now an anti-death penalty activist for Amnesty International, tells The Sunday Paper: “We had to go through preparations each time: final visits, saying goodbye, making arrangements with the funeral home to transport body, all of that. Family stress for my mom, my son and siblings, listening to the other family [victim Mark MacPhail’s family] get angrier each time Troy was not killed. Yet, no matter what, Troy was prayerful, hopeful and always concerned about us more than himself.”

Steven B. Bright, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, told the New York Times: “Georgia is willing to risk the credibility of its whole death penalty system in carrying out this one very questionable execution. The death penalty should really only be enforced in cases where there is no question about guilt, and that just cannot be said about this case.”

As The Sunday Paper goes to press, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals is considering one hour of oral arguments the court allowed Troy’s lawyer and the state to make on Dec. 9. If two of the three judges decide that there is enough doubt to merit it, the court will allow Troy to seek an evidentiary hearing in the Savannah district that first convicted him.

“Right now, no one is even looking at the evidence, they are deciding whether or not his case meets the procedural obligations to be heard,” says Jared Feuer with Amnesty International.

If the hearing is granted, Troy may not only escape the death penalty; he may be on his way to being found innocent.—S.R.

MEREDITH EMERSON

The saga of her disappearance lasted all of one month, but the shadow of 24-year-old Meredith Emerson’s kidnapping and murder will stretch on for as long as there are stories about people who have faced the world with innocence and courage, only to be met with inhuman cruelty.

When a trail in Gwinnett County was named in her honor in October, hundreds of people turned out to participate in a fun run to open it. According to a report by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of the people there that day, Lawrenceville resident Joel Hitt, said: “I took her kidnapping and murder very personally.” He could have been speaking for the hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who prayed for her safety in the first days after her disappearance at Vogel State Park on New Year’s Day 2008, and then cried and prayed for her family when the gruesome details of her kidnapping, rape, murder and decapitation were revealed.

It turned out that little Meredith, at 5 feet 4 inches and 120 pounds, had almost whipped her attacker’s ass. That’s what the GBI said, in those words in fact, and when Gary Michael Hilton pleaded guilty to her murder on Jan. 31, he agreed, albeit in the same eerily bragging way he had used to describe how he had killed her.

Meredith, who had trained in judo, fought for her life physically and mentally. She survived three days in torturous captivity. At first she managed to take away Hilton’s knife and, later, after being brutally beaten and chained with a padlock, she was still clever enough to give him the wrong PIN for her ATM card repeatedly, in the vain hope that the bank would alert authorities.

Even in her death, the feisty University of Georgia grad has been a force for good. Her friends have founded Right to Hike, Inc., which promotes safety measures on trails, including GPS tracking systems so hikers can signal law enforcement for help, as well as pet micro-chip implants; it was Meredith’s dog, which Hilton set free, that gave the first definite clue in the case via a microchip.

To learn how to become a part of Meredith’s legacy, visit www.righttohikeinc.com

Hilton, meanwhile, is serving a life sentence for Meredith’s murder. He bartered leading investigators to Meredith’s remains in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.—S.R.

 MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Barack Obama. Martin Luther King Jr.

The comparison has been made so often that saying one automatically brings the other to mind. But it was Martin Luther King, Jr.—or as Atlantans are apt to say, MLK—who blazed the trail that Obama would follow. (In Atlanta, those who knew him personally refer to him as “Martin,” but so do the people who want you to think they knew him personally, so it gets a little confusing.)

Not since 1968, the year he was assassinated, has the Civil Rights martyr been so omnipresent as in 2008. For the people who loved him, seeing Obama campaign was almost like having MLK back again. Obama wasn’t just “clean” and “articulate,” as his Democratic primary rival (and eventual vice president-elect) Joe Biden said; he was the embodiment of MLK’s dream.

“I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,” Obama said in his famous Philadelphia speech. “I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners—an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

They say that the South was cut out of the political formula this year, since Obama and Biden hail from the Midwest and Northeast, respectively. But that isn’t true. It was our own MLK who put Obama, the nation’s first black president, in the White House. Here in Atlanta, whether we voted for him or not, we felt the magic of the moment. Even as Obama said those remarkable words in Philadelphia, words that bring tears to the eyes of liberals and conservatives alike, there seemed to be an echo down the long hall of history that sounded a lot like MLK on Aug. 28, 1963:

“I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ … This will be the day when all God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning—‘My country ‘tis of thee; sweet land of liberty; of thee I sing; land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride; from every mountainside; let freedom ring’—And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.”—S.R. SP