AMERICA:Legal figures have asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the case of Troy Davis, writes DENIS STAUNTON.
TROY DAVIS has come close to execution three times in the past two years for the murder of a police officer 20 years ago he claims he did not commit, and he could be put to death within weeks if the Supreme Court does not intervene.
Seven of the nine non-police witnesses who implicated Davis have recanted their testimony in sworn affidavits and this week, 28 former prosecutors and judges asked the Supreme Court to order a hearing to assess the evidence of his innocence.
“The point is that no court has ever conducted a hearing to make an assessment of the evidence of Troy’s innocence. And to execute him in the face of this evidence of innocence would not only be unconstitutional, but as a moral matter would be unconscionable,” said Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree.
“When you see people like a deputy US attorney general, two former state supreme court chief justices, federal judges and states’ attorney generals, you get a sense that they all believe that the unified message is that Troy Davis has been denied an opportunity to have his day in court.”
Pope Benedict XVI, the European Parliament and Amnesty International are among those who have appealed for clemency on Davis’s behalf. Last month, however, an appeals court denied a request for an evidentiary hearing, arguing that Davis’s lawyers should have introduced the new evidence earlier.
Davis was convicted in 1991 of the murder two years earlier of Mark MacPhail , a 27-year-old off-duty police officer in Savannah, Georgia. MacPhail was shot dead in a Burger King parking lot after he intervened to stop an attack on Larry Young, a homeless man who had been slapped across the face with a pistol.
No physical evidence linked Davis, who is African-American, to the crime but a number of eyewitnesses identified him as the killer. Among the witnesses was Sylvester “Red” Coles, who was with Davis at the time of the shooting. Coles has not recanted his testimony but a number of witnesses now say that they implicated Davis after coercion from police and others have come forward to say it was Coles who pulled the trigger.
Tonya Johnson lived near the Burger King and after the shooting she saw Coles, who she knew as Red, and a man called Terry running away. “When I saw Red and Terry they were both in a panic and very nervous. Red and Terry each had a gun with them at that time. Red asked me to hold the guns for him, which I refused to do. Red then took both guns next door to an empty house and put them inside the screen door and shut the door,” she said.
“I have known Red all of my life. He used to live next door to me . . . For most of my life I have been scared to death of him. In fact, he threatened me after this happened. He told me that he wanted to make sure that I did not tell the police about the guns he hid in the screen door that morning. This is why I did not testify about the guns at Troy’s trial because I was afraid of what Red would do to me if I did.”
Another witness says he saw Coles pull the trigger and two others said that Coles told them he had killed the police officer.
Campaigners against the death penalty say that Davis’s case shows how legislation introduced by Bill Clinton to speed up executions has increased the risk of deadly miscarriages of justice. The 1996 Effective Anti-terrorism and Death Penalty Act imposed severe time limits on the raising of constitutional claims, restricted the federal courts’ ability to review state court decisions, placed limits on federal courts granting and conducting evidentiary hearings, and prohibited “successive” appeals except in narrow circumstances.
Davis’s best hope of escaping execution lies with the Supreme Court, which can order a judicial review in “extremely rare” cases in which there is a “substantial claim that constitutional error has caused the conviction of an innocent person”.
Twenty-nine people have been executed in the US this year – all but nine of them black or Latino.