aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, July 13, 2007

Georgia denies Troy Davis more time for clemency case

The execution of Troy Davis is set for Tuesday. His clemency hearing is 9 a.m. Monday:

The state Board of Pardons and Paroles denied a request from Troy Anthony Davis’ lawyers this afternoon for more time to make their case for clemency.

Lawyers had asked that the Monday meeting to discuss clemency be postponed. They had formally asked for a stay so they can have more time to gather witnesses and transport them to Atlanta.

Mike King, no bleeding heard liberal, makes the case for the parole board to intervene:

Davis, 38, was convicted of the brutal murder of Mark Allen MacPhail, a young Savannah police officer responding to a fight in a parking lot in 1989. Without substantive physical evidence—no gun, no DNA—prosecutors relied entirely on the testimony of witnesses. They found nine who implicated Davis. A jury found him guilty. He has been on death row since 1991, but Davis has maintained his innocence from the day he was arrested.

After his legal appeals were exhausted, however, significant developments occurred that demand closer examination:

> Seven of the original nine witnesses against Davis have renounced or contradicted their trial testimony. An alarming number now claim they were intimidated by the police. Of the two witnesses who have not recanted their testimony, one was implicated by two other witnesses during the trial as MacPhail’s killer, and by four new witnesses since then.

> Davis is caught in an untenable procedural bind. Because of a 1996 law aimed at speeding up death penalty appeals, federal and state courts have ruled they can’t consider new evidence in a death penalty case if the defendant should have brought it to the court’s attention during the appeals process. But in the Davis case, most of the witnesses didn’t recant their testimony until years later. Moreover, to get the courts to reopen the case, the defendant must be able to show that given the new evidence, no reasonable juror would convict him. That’s an impossibly high standard.

> Some of the witnesses didn’t get a chance to recant because the initial appeal in the Davis case was handled by attorneys from an underfunded state defender’s agency that lacked the resources to track witnesses down and investigate what they told police, as opposed to what they testified to at trial.

There will be a vigil in Savannah in support of Davis tomorrow at 6 p.m.

LATER: With sidebars on ten stories of men who languished in prison for crimes they didn’t commit and the Georgia Innocence Project 15 year anniversary, Time Magazine weighs in, “The pending execution of Troy Anthony Davis, scheduled to take place on July 17, is raising serious questions about his guilt - and about the Newt Gingrich-era federal law that has limited his appeals options and prevented him, say his supporters, from getting a fair shake.”