Georgia Parole Board Denies Clemency for Troy Davis – UPDATE

To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.
– Desmond Tutu

The path for Troy Anthony Davis’s to receive a lethal injection appears to be now cleared. His execution is scheduled for 7 pm on Wednesday.

The Christian Science Monitor (among others) has the story. Here’s a clip:

Pope Benedict, President Carter, and former FBI head William Sessions were among nearly 700,000 people around the world who campaigned, via signatures and testimony, that Mr. Davis’s life be spared after seven of nine witnesses to the 1989 murder of off-duty Savannah, Ga., police officer Mark MacPhail changed or recanted their testimony in recent years.

The parole board appeal was a last-ditch effort for Davis after the Supreme Court, in a highly unusual move, demanded a district court review of the case last year. In the end, the review found that new evidence and changes in witness testimony didn’t substantially affect the validity of the original 1991 murder conviction.

After three hours of testimony on Monday, Davis’s lawyers said they believed they had demonstrated “substantial doubt” that Davis was the triggerman in the shooting of Mr. MacPhail, a former Army Ranger and young father, outside a Burger King in Savannah, Ga. One piece of new evidence included testimony that a different man at the scene later confessed he pulled the trigger.

But MacPhail’s family, including his wife, told the clemency board that “it’s time for justice.” Joan MacPhail-Harris, his wife, told reporters that Davis’s claim of innocence was “a lie.”

Because of its high profile and byzantine journey through the US death penalty system, the Troy Davis case has been seen by some legal experts as a bellwether case for a justice system that sets a high bar for death row inmates trying to prove their innocence.

“Davis could not clearly establish that he was actually innocent,” despite dramatic reversals in witnesses’ stories and new questions about a key ballistics test, says Russell Covey, a law professor at Georgia State University, in Atlanta.

Here’s an impassioned essay from writer/commentator Kevin Powell.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution columnist Jim Galloway is keeping track of reactions from local figures in the state of Georgia.

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From E.D. Kain writing for Forbes

….If Davis is not guilty and we kill him nonetheless then we have simply stacked one murder on top of another. The life of Mark MacPhail will not be avenged. If Davis is guilty, surely serving out the remainder of his life in state prison should be enough. Justice does not require retribution.

Death is tragic. The death of Mark MacPhail is a tragedy that will never be undone. Not by blood, not by prison bars, not by time, not by proof that Davis is guilty or proof that he is innocent. But if we have even a glimmer of doubt about his guilt, there will be no justice in his death. If we have even a hint of uncertainty over whether this man did the deeds he was accused of, but which most of his accusers have since recanted, we should stay his execution.

But the history of justice in America is scarred across by such tragedies.

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Andrew Cohen, chief Legal analyst and legal editor for CBS writing for the Atlantic.

……In the modern era of capital punishment — since the Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia — three main camps have emerged. First, there are those who are for the death penalty all the way; the ones who lament the time and money it takes from trial to execution. Then, there are those who are against capital punishment all the way; the ones who believe that the state should never be in the business of killing its own citizens. And between the two solitudes, there is a vast middle; those who believe that there is a place for the death penalty, but only if it can be administered fairly and accurately, free from the sort of arbitrary and capricious decision-making that pushed the justices to do away with it in the first place in 1972 in Furman v. Georgia.

With the Buck case coming back around later this month, with the Davis case right before us this week, with a leading presidential candidate making his capital punishment record a point of political pride, and with the Tea Party crowd cheering execution statistics, now seems as good a time as any to dig around a little at this strange legal confluence we’ve come to on the death penalty. Nearly 40 years after the Supreme Court first took away the death penalty, we may be closer than many people think to another turning point on capital punishment. We may be reaching the Icarus point — and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

[HUGE SNIP]

Whether the trial witnesses against [Davis] were lying then or are lying now, by fighting against his requested relief Georgia is saying that its interest in the finality of its capital judgments is more important than the accuracy of its capital verdicts. You can certainly find concern for such chilling sentiment in the gloomy language of Furman. But you sure can’t find it in the puffy language of Gregg. In their zeal to make good on cynical campaign promises to be “tough on crime,” in their pursuit of vengeance on behalf of grieving families, in their reckless disregard for the racial realities of capital punishment, elected or appointed proponents of the death penalty are in the process of ruining the mandate the Supreme Court gave them 35 years ago.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I’ll continue to cover these death penalty stories, sure I will, but I promise I’ll no longer coddle what Justice Brennan called the “delusions” of opportunists like Rick Perry when they look into a camera and tell us that they’ve “never struggled” over death penalty cases. It’s crazy talk like that, truly “wanton and freakish,” to use Justice White’s words in Gregg, which gave us Furman to begin with and which, I believe, will ultimately bring it round again.

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UPDATEs: TROY DAVIS’S ATTORNEYS SAY DAVIS WILL TAKE A POLYGRAPH TO PROVE HE IS NOT THE KILLER

This was the news from late Tuesday night. The Atlanta Journal Constitution has the story.

Also, here’s a link to the Board of Parole’s full statement.

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NY TIMES CALLS THE DECISION “A GRIEVOUS WRONG.”

Here’s how the editorial opens:

Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday for the 1989 killing of a police officer in Savannah, Ga. The Georgia pardon and parole board’s refusal to grant him clemency is appalling in light of developments after his conviction: reports about police misconduct, the recantation of testimony by a string of eyewitnesses and reports from other witnesses that another person had confessed to the crime. …

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A NEW GROUP OF 250,000 PETITION SIGNATURES will be delivered to to the offices of Chatham County District Attorney Larry Chisolm Wednesday morning at 9 a.m., in the hope that Chisolm will intervene and request that Davis’ death warrant be revoked.

(Of course, last week, more than 650,000 signatures were delivered to the Georgia Board of Paroles and Pardons—and we saw how well that worked out.)

This seems like something of a frail hope in that the prosecutor said in a statement Tuesday that he is powerless to withdraw an execution order for Davis issued by a state Superior Court judge.

That leaves the U.S. Supreme Court.

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WEDNESDAY MORNING, POLYGRAPH REQUEST BLOCKED BY GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. ATTORNEYS ASK FOR LAST MINUTE 90 DAY STAY FROM LOCAL SUPERIOR COURT

CBS News has the story.

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#TooMuchDoubt and #Who Is Troy Davis are each drawing about 20 tweets every 30 seconds.

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Photo by David Tulis for the AP