After the prison-yard murder of Larry Davis in upstate New York, most City papers noted his infamy and folk- or anti-hero status, but for the most part were content to portray him as a vicious thug, murderer, and all-around lowlife. Davis was shanked multiple times by another inmate at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster county New York.
Davis was serving a 25 years-to-life sentence there for murder, even after he was acquitted of the 1986 shooting of six NYPD cops despite overwhelming evidence against him. His defense lawyers, William Kunstler and Lynne Stewart, asserted with no corroborating evidence that Davis was the target of an assassination plot by police.
The NY Post called Davis a "thug" who was at the receiving end of prison "justice." The paper quoted a former Bronx assistant district attorney from the 1980s who said "You reap what you sow. He led a violent life. He died a violent death." And Donald O'Sullivan, one of the police officers shot by Davis in 1986, said "[Davis] was not going to die in peace. They made him out to be a choir boy, but he would kill a priest."
A Daily News editorial described Kunstler's and Stewart's defense strategy a "fairy tale," and described the murder of Larry Davis as the "Shawangunk redemption." News of the man's death elicited a sarcastic "Boo hoo" from the editorial board and a send-off epitaph of "Fittingly, he rests in pieces."
And an article in the NYTimes yesterday does the most to play up Davis' reputation as a symbol of resistance to some people, but prefaces its article with the following description: "He was nobody, really, back in the 1980s, just a high school dropout in the Bronx, a short, burly black kid with Mike Tyson muscles who made a living with drugs and guns and fear."
