Death row inmate gets new hope
Georgia Supreme Court will let convicted cop killer Troy Anthony Davis argue for another trial. Victim's family is stunned.

By Rhonda Cook
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 08/04/07

The Georgia Supreme Court agreed Friday to give convicted cop killer Troy Anthony Davis the chance to make his case for a new trial.

Davis was just a day away from dying by lethal injection July 16 when the State Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a 90-day stay of execution. The board is scheduled to take up Davis' case again Thursday, although that could change after it considers the Supreme Court's action.

The most Davis could have hoped for from the parole board is a commuted sentence of life in prison. The Supreme Court's decision means he has the chance to prove he should be set free.

Davis was sentenced to death for fatally shooting Savannah police Officer Mark Allen MacPhail in 1989. Since his trial, seven of nine trial witnesses have since recanted their testimonies. Others have stepped forward with additional information about the case.

The parole board had asked to hear directly from those witnesses at its Thursday hearing. A spokeswoman for the board said it would announce Monday if the hearing would be held as scheduled after the five members have read the Supreme Court's decision.

The court put Davis' case on its November calendar.

Danielle Garten, one of Davis' attorneys, was thrilled to hear of the decision Friday. She said she spoke to Davis moments after the order was issued. "Oh. That's great news," was his response Garten said.

Family members in Savannah were overwhelmed.

"Thank you, Jesus," Davis' sister Martina Correia screamed when she heard the news. "It's about time that my brother walked out of that jail."

Though the court's order does not mean Davis will be freed, Correia said she was also thrilled that "somebody was willing to hear him out."

MacPhail's family was stunned by the most recent twist and prospect of more waiting.

"I don't understand after all we've been through, all the appeals and denials, that this is coming up before the Georgia Supreme Court again. This has come out of left field," said Anneliese MacPhail, the mother of the officer.

MacPhail said she and her family had been hoping for a final decision out of the parole board hearing scheduled for Thursday.

Until now, the courts had refused to take the case, despite the changed testimony and new information, in part due to a federal law designed to expedite death penalty appeals.

In granting his extraordinary motion, the state Supreme Court granted a rare exception.

The court voted 4-3 to hear the case.

In his dissent, Justice George Carley said many of the issues now being raised could have been brought up long ago. "It's now more than 14 years since this court unanimously affirmed Davis' conviction and sentence of death," Carley wrote.

The Supreme Court was asked to consider the appeal after Chatham County Superior Court Judge Penny Haas Freesemann ruled that Davis' new evidence did not meet the legal standards for new trials.

Garten said the attorneys still must focus on the parole hearing.

"The board has asked to speak with some other witnesses and we are in the process of looking for other witnesses," she said. "We don't have any subpoena power so it makes it more challenging."

Staff writers Moni Basu and Sonji Jacobs contributed to this article.

Seems like maybe people are starting to realize that there are many innocent people in prison.
Dee

Yeah the found the light .

New questions cast doubt on Troy Davis conviction

By CARLOS CAMPOS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 08/05/07

There wasn't much for crime scene analysts to pore over after Savannah police Officer Mark Allen MacPhail was fatally shot in a Burger King parking lot on Aug. 19, 1989.

There were no fingerprints, murder weapons, tire tracks, bloody footprints or other basic clues that help detectives track down killers. Only the bullets extracted from MacPhail and empty shell casings found on the ground provided the tiniest bit of physical evidence.

Troy Anthony Davis was eventually sentenced to death for the murder, mostly on the testimony of eyewitnesses who identified him as the shooter.

Most of those witnesses have since recanted. And now his defense team, seeking to save him from execution, is challenging the conclusions drawn from the ballistics analysis done in the Davis case. They've hired one of the state's leading firearms experts, who concluded the analysis done soon after the killing was deeply flawed.

The questions they've raised have bought Davis time. Last month, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles temporarily halted his execution, just 24 hours before it was to be carried out. And on Friday, the Georgia Supreme Court granted Davis a rare opportunity to make his case for a new trial.

The state parole board is scheduled to take up Davis' case again Thursday. Parole board members want to hear directly from the witnesses who now say they made up testimony that implicated Davis. And they have asked for new tests on the bullets found at the scene.

Police collected at least 20 bullets and shell casings from two areas the night of MacPhail's murder: the Burger King parking lot where he was killed and a nearby bank, and the site of a pool party where two men were injured in separate drive-by shootings just a short time apart that same night.

Prosecutors believed Davis was responsible for at least one of the shootings at the party and for MacPhail's murder at a Burger King across from the Yamacraw public housing project. A GBI crime analyst linked bullets from all three shootings, concluding they could have come from the same gun, either a .38 Special or .357 Magnum revolver.

During the trial, prosecutor Spencer Lawton told the jury that Davis was carrying a .38 that night and that bullets he fired at the party could be matched with those fired into the body of Officer McPhail.

But Jason Ewart, one of Davis' lawyers, said the evidence doesn't support that conclusion.

"The ballistics do not connect Troy to any crime," he said. Ewart was not Davis' attorney during the trial.

Lawton, the Chatham County district attorney, has not commented publicly on the case. But in court filings, his office dismissed Davis' recent claims as a baseless, last-minute delay tactic.

Roger Parian, director of the GBI crime lab in Savannah at the time, indicated in a report that bullets and empty shell casings found at the different crime scenes were similar, meaning the gun used to kill Officer MacPhail could have been the same one used to shoot Michael Cooper and Sherman Coleman, the two men injured at the pool party earlier.

Davis was in both places that night, although witnesses have said others were at both crime scenes.

Analysis 'wrong at worst'

In a report written for Davis' defense team in 2003 and submitted to the state parole board, retired GBI ballistics expert Kelly Fite concluded that Parian's analysis was "shoddy and questionable at best and patently wrong at worst." Fite concluded his analysis by stating, "As it appears now, the [ballistics] testing already conducted in this case is wholly lacking in reliability."

Dead Man Waiting
By Alice Kim
Martina Correia, Troy Davis' sister, speaks next to Genevieve Garrigos, (L), president of Amnesty International France, during a protest to denounce the death penalty in the United States in Concorde, in Paris on July 2. Troy Davis was sentenced to death in 1991.
Share Digg del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine In an unprecedented move, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta recently stayed the Oct. 27 execution of Georgia death row prisoner Troy Davis.

On Oct. 24, the court said it would consider a new hearing on whether the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits the execution of the innocent.

In September, the U.S. Supreme Court halted Davis’ execution to consider the issue but then denied to hear the case.

“The case is extraordinary,” says Stephen Bright, president and former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, based in Atlanta. Last year, the Georgia Supreme Court also stayed the execution to consider the innocence claim, he says, but then denied it by a single vote, 4-3.

Now the federal court — applying the federal law regarding claims of innocence — has granted another stay to decide whether to order a hearing on the innocence issues.

In 1991, Davis, a 39-year-old African-American man, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of Ma rk MacPhail, a white, off-duty police officer, at a Burger King parking lot in Savannah, Ga. Davis was convicted based solely on witness testimony that contained many inconsistencies, according to a 35-page Amnesty International report released in February 2007.

With the federal court’s recent stay, Davis’ attorneys have 15 days to make their case for an appeal. The Georgia state’s attorney then has 10 days to respond. The outcome of these legal maneuvers was unresolved, as In These Times went to press.

Since the original 1991 trial, seven of the nine witnesses have recanted. Many of them have stated in sworn affidavits that police coerced them to testify against Davis. What’s more, no physical evidence against Davis — such as the gun used in the crime — was ever found. Davis, who maintains his innocence, surrendered himself to the police in 1989 to clear his name.

He has received an outpouring of attention and international support, including from former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former President Jimmy Carter. On Oct. 23, his supporters organized a Global Day of Action for Troy Davis. More than 35 cities around the world held marches, rallies and other actions opposing the Oct. 27 execution.

Martina Correa, Davis’ sister, says it has been difficult for her brother and their family to say goodbye to him twice, and to prepare for the state to execute him.

“Yet Troy remains prayerful, faithful and humbled by all the show of human kindness,” says Correa. “Our prayer is that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals will rule in Troy’s favor and that no matter what happens, activists from around the world will stay focused on the bigger picture and that is the abolition of the death penalty.”

As of Oct. 31, Georgia was one of seven states to carry out executions in 2008. All but one of the 30 U.S. executions to date were in the South — 14 in Texas, four in Virginia, three in Georgia, two in South Carolina, two in Mississippi, two in Oklahoma, two in Florida and one in Ohio. At the same time, this fall, courts have granted stays of execution in at least a dozen cases — including Davis’.

Between September 2007 and April 2008, a national de facto moratorium was in place while the Supreme Court considered whether Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol violated the Eighth Amendment in Baze v. Rees. After the high court’s April 2008 decision that it did not, executions have since resumed and have taken place at a rate of at least one per week.

Almost half of the prisoners executed were African-American or Latino (47 percent), and most victims in those murders were white (59 percent). Additionally, no white defendants were executed in 2008 for the murder of an African American, according to October statistics from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit.

In Texas, where the state carried out 14 executions since May, the DPIC anticipates more than 14 additional executions there by the end of the year. But Texas and the other Southern states carrying out executions are exceptions to a declining U.S. trend, as the death penalty faces increasing scrutiny.

As Correa says, “The road has been hard and uphill, and we still have a battle at hand.”