If this doesn’t help expose the problems with capital punishment, I don’t know what more it will take.
A Georgia man is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Tuesday for killing a police officer in 1989, even though the case against him has withered in recent years as most of the key witnesses at his trial have recanted and in some cases said they lied under pressure from police.
Prosecutors discount the significance of the recantations and argue that it is too late to present such evidence. But supporters of Troy Davis, 38, and some legal scholars say the case illustrates the dangers wrought by decades of Supreme Court decisions and new laws that have rendered the courts less likely to overturn a death sentence.
“Too late”? There’s relevant evidence regarding a case in which the state is poised to kill an American who may be innocent, but there’s a time limit?
The Davis case is just now reaching national attention, and it’s about time. Here’s the story in a nutshell: a late-night scuffle broke out in a Burger King parking lot in Savannah. When Mark A. MacPhail, an off-duty police officer, tried to intervene, someone pulled a gun and shot him twice, killing MacPhail.
Sylvester “Red” Coles, came to the police with a lawyer, accusing Troy Davis. Witnesses say it was Coles, not Davis, who killed the officer.
But once the man-hunt began for Davis, law enforcement officials wanted to believe he was the man responsible for the slaying, and pressured witnesses accordingly. At this point, three of the four witnesses who testified at trial have signed statements contradicting their identification of the gunman. Two other witnesses who fingered Davis have said they made their stories up.
Those who saw Coles shoot MacPhail are anxious to say so, but their testimony has been blocked by federal courts, citing a provision in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.
“It’s getting scary,” Davis said by phone last week. “They don’t want to hear the new facts.”
What we’re left with is a man sentenced to death despite no physical evidence, based on the word of witnesses who have since recanted or contradicted their testimony.
Why would these witnesses implicate Davis? Because they were leaned on to do so.
“The police came over here four or five times,” said Jeffrey Sapp, 38, a neighborhood acquaintance of Davis. “They said, ‘You know, your friend is on the run, so he must be guilty.’ They said, ‘If you don’t talk, we can take you to jail for withholding evidence.’ ”
Sapp eventually told them that Davis had bicycled by his house and confessed to shooting MacPhail.
“It was a lie,” Sapp said.
Other key witnesses have told a similar story — that police prodded them to implicate Davis. The affidavit from Darrell Collins, the friend who was with Davis that night, was typical.
“I told them it was Red and not Troy who was messing with that man, but they didn’t want to hear that,” Collins, who was 16 at the time, said in his 2002 statement. “The detectives told me, ‘Fine, have it your way. Kiss your life goodbye because you’re going to jail.’ After a couple of hours of the detectives yelling at me and threatening me, I finally broke down and told them what they wanted to hear.”
William S. Sessions, FBI director under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, not exactly an ACLU member, wrote recently in an op-ed piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “serious questions have been raised about Davis’s guilt…. It would be intolerable to execute an innocent man.”
We may see that happen very soon. If only Davis had worked for Dick Cheney….