Convicted cop killer Troy Davis is slated to be executed at 7 pm tonight after being denied clemency from a Georgia pardons board. Denial of clemency has been described as routine.
This execution has been troublesome for many people including proponents of the death penalty. 7 out of 9 of the witnesses in the trial have recanted their statements. At least one has said that he was young when he said what he gave them what they wanted to hear.
CBS News reports the following:
CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen described the denial of clemency as “routine.”
“Parole boards almost never grant clemency, so this is not a surprise,” Cohen said. “Now if Wednesday’s execution is going to be halted it’s going to have to come from the federal courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular, which last week halted a Texas execution.”
Davis has gotten support from hundreds of thousands of people, including a former FBI director, former President Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI, and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling gave him an unusual opportunity to prove his innocence last year. State and federal courts, however, repeatedly upheld his conviction for the 1989 killing of Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer who was working as a security guard in Savannah when he was shot dead rushing to help a homeless man who was being attacked.
Apparently the Georgia governor is out of the picture ince he lacks to power to block an execution. The victim’s family is also pushing for execution, hoping for final closure. The murder was gruesome:
Spencer Lawton, the prosecutor who secured Davis’ conviction in 1991, said he has no doubt he is guilty.
“What we have had is a manufactured appearance of doubt which has taken on the quality of legitimate doubt itself. And all of it is exquisitely unfair,” Lawton said.
MacPhail was shot to death Aug. 19, 1989, after coming to the aid of Larry Young, a homeless man who was being pistol-whipped in a Burger King parking lot. Prosecutors say Davis was with another man who was demanding that Young give him a beer when Davis pulled out a handgun and bashed Young with it. When MacPhail arrived to help, prosecutors say Davis had a smirk on his face when he shot the officer to death.
Witnesses placed Davis at the crime scene and identified him as the shooter. Shell casings were linked to a shooting hours earlier that Davis was convicted of. There was no other physical evidence. No blood or DNA tied Davis to the crime and the weapon was never located.
Davis’ attorneys say seven of nine key witnesses who testified at his trial have disputed all or parts of their testimony.
I support the death penalty, especially for cop killers, but damn. There is no physical evidence. No DNA evidence. There is reasonable doubt. No one is suggesting turning Davis lose. Any time there is legal doubt, however, the death penalty should be put aside for life in prison. Take down the gallows.
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Mr. Howler says he should not get a stay. He wonders why it is coming up now instead of 20 years ago.
The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a last-ditch appeal from Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis, allowing the state to proceed with the scheduled execution Wednesday evening of the convicted cop killer. – CNN
Executed several minutes after 11.
I don’t think we should execute when there is that much doubt.
I’m inclined to be on the side of Mr. Howler, this time. People don’t stay on death row for 20years in the Commonwealth or Texas. I can’t blame the lawyers for trying every possible avenue of appeal. But 20 years later, really?
There were an awful lot of people who felt this execution should have been stayed– people you wouldn’t expect to be on the side of stay. One such person was former Congressman Bob Barr, known for being a real hard nose.
MSNBC:
If Bob Barr feels execution is inappropriate, it probably is.
At what point do we start questioning how these trials go? If this guy had some bucks and a big bucks lawyer, would he even have been convicted?
This case is making me think my own hard line support of the death penalty. The physical evidence just wasn’t there.
See newly posted video above.
Wow, Moon, you bring up a real conundrum. If an execution is stopped because we feel we do not have the absolute evidence to say that he actually committed the crime, how do you then justify keeping the same individual in prison for the rest of his life? Being absolutely certain of guilt but still stopping an execution is one thing. But, it seems to me that a case like that of Troy Davis may be a whole different ball of wax.
This is what we all get for listening to the media.
There were 34 witnesses, not 9. Feel free to read the court report located here:
http://www.gasd.uscourts.gov/pdf/409cv00130_92part1.pdf — page 41.
http://www.gasd.uscourts.gov/pdf/409cv00130_92part2.pdf
Of the 7, 3 recants were from friends of Davis who made relatively insequential modifications to their testimony. One was from a former girlfriend who is now dead. In all four of these “recants” or modifications, the remaining testimony still implicated Davis. Only one of the recantations was meaningful and was dimished because it only proved that the author testifying falsely at the first trial. Of the remaining two, the affidavits were discounted due to Davis refusing to let them testify. Page 168
Other inconsistencies were related to the shirt that was worn by Davis. Some said, white, some said white with writing, some specifically said white Batman shirt. None of them said that that the shirt was anything other than white, and the accomplice with Davis, was wearing yellow. Feel free to read the court docs.
To the claim of no physical evidence, the gun that was found on Davis was balistically matched to another shooting that Davis was known to have committed and to the shooting of MacPhail.
Read the court docs for yourself, instead of listening to media soundbites. Personally, I don’t believe that there was any reason for nullifying the verdict or postponing the death. I’ve read the court docs (it was painful, lawyer speak sucks), and I feel justice was served. 22 years too late, but served none the less.
Rednex —I don’t recall that the gun itself was ever found. I think it was the shell casings from both incidents which matched in ballistics testing.
@ Wolverine
You are absolutely correct. My apologies. The gun was never recovered. The ballasitics evidence was based on another shooting, of which Davis was convicted and of which he did not challenge or refute the conviction that matched with the bullet retrieved from McPhail.