7:05 pm Eastern time
US SUPREME COURT DELAYS EXECUTION IN ORDER TO CONSIDER A STAY
Twitter had it first, but then around 7:15 a few news stories emerged. Here’s the story from the Guardian. Troy Davis was schedule to be executed on Wednesday at 7 pm eastern.
Here is some additional information from MSNBC.
“We are in a delay, waiting for a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court,” Peggy Chapman of the Georgia Department of Corrections told NBC News. “There has not been a reprieve issued.”
About 200 Davis supporters gathered outside the Jackson prison cheered as news of the lethal-injection delay spread. Police were on hand to deal with any possible disturbance if the execution goes ahead.
The last-ditch effort with the U.S. Supreme Court came just 45 minutes before the execution was scheduled and after state officials refused to grant Davis a reprieve in the face of calls for clemency from former President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI and others.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Georgia’s Supreme Court had rejected a last appeal by Davis’ lawyers. Earlier, a Butts County Superior Court judge also declined to stop the execution. Davis was convicted in the 1989 slaying of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail.
In their U.S. Supreme Court filing, Davis’ attorneys said “substantial constitutional errors” were made when the lower courts denied his claims that “newly available evidence reveals that false, misleading and materially inaccurate information was presented at his capital trial in 1989, rendering the convictions and death sentence fundamentally unreliable,” NBC News reported.
7:53 pm
DEMOCRACY NOW LIVE STREAMING UNTIL 9 P.M. FROM OUTSIDE PRISON
Here’s the link.
Martina Correa, Davis’s sister is extremely impressive, by the way.
Here is the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s timeline. The AJC has a reporter also with Mark Allen MacPhail’s mother, Anneliese, whom they wrote was “….surrounded by friends and relatives at her home, was leafing through photos of her son, and in her words ‘smoking like a steam engine’ as she awaited word on whether the execution would proceed tonight…”
SCOTUS DENIES STAY. TROY DAVIS DIED AT 11:08 PM EASTERN.
Here’s the timeline from the AJC:
11:25 AJC reporter Rhonda Cook and other media witnesses report that Davis addressed the MacPhail family directly from the gurney and again proclaimed his innocence, asked mercy for those about to kill him and asked his friends and supporters to continue working to get to the truth of officer MacPhail’s death.
11:08 Davis pronounced dead.
10:57 State Attorney Generals office notifies MacPhail’s mother Anneliese “[Davis] is on the gurney, the needle is in.”
10:52 ORDER IN PENDING CASE 11A317 DAVIS, ANTHONY TROY V. HUMPHREY, WARDEN:
The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to Justice Thomas and by him referred to the Court is denied. (Link to SCOTUS.)
10:31 About 150 remaining Davis supporters were still in prayer outside the state Capitol 10 minutes after hearing the stay had been denied.
10:27 “I’d like to have some peace now that it’s over,” Anneliese MacPhail mother of murdered officer Mark Allen MacPhail to CNN.
10:18 Davis’ attorneys say the U.S. Supreme Court has denied the stay.
10:08 State Attorney Generals office notifies MacPhail’s mother Anneliese they have received an email from the U.S. Supreme Court to expect word in another 10 to 20 minutes.
The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington was more eloquent than most other reporters in writing about Troy Davis’s last words. In fact Pilkington has consistently done a better job than most in conveying the unfolding facts of the matter, but not bleaching the meaning out of the circumstances, when reporting on the wrenching Davis case.
Moments before he was put to death, Troy Davis lifted his head from the gurney to which he was strapped and looked the family of Mark MacPhail, the police officer for whose murder he was convicted, directly in the eyes.
“I want to talk to the MacPhail family,” he said. “I was not responsible for what happened that night. I did not have a gun. I was not the one who took the life of your father, son, brother.”
He then appealed to his own family and friends to “keep the faith”, said to the medical personnel who were about to kill him “may God have mercy on your souls”, and laid his head down again.
He was administered with a triple lethal injection of pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride, and at 11.08pm he was pronounced dead.
The debate about what happened in Georgia’s Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson late on Wednesday night will continue long after the gurney has been put away. In the final gruesome hours of waiting, the American judicial system at its very highest echelons was involved – including the US supreme court, which issued the decisive final ruling. The decision to press ahead with the death sentence despite serious doubts over Davis’s guilt drew accusations that this was the system at its most grotesque.
It was Davis’s fourth execution date, and it was dragged out, for more than four hours, to what must have been tortuous effect for the prisoner and his family.
Davis, 42, became the 52nd man to be executed in Georgia since the same supreme court reinstated the death penalty in 1973. His lawyers and thousands of supporters around the world were convinced that an innocent man had been sent to his death.
I had heard that the supply of Pentobarbital from some chemist shop in England was cut off months ago, and they instead used Nembutal, what we used to call yellowjackets,
which is used by vets to put down our pets in this country.
I know that I’m not the only one whose views on capital punishment have been modified significantly over the course of my life. When I heard of the execution of one of the murderers of James Byrd last night, I was rather unaffected, so I’m not there yet.
But the execution of Troy Davis was a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Good job, Georgia. Good job, Supreme Court. Proud of you.
I’m opposed to the death penalty but I was glad to hear that one of James Byrd’s murderers was executed yesterday. Conflicted emotions. Troy Davis shouldn’t have been executed last night. Can I have it both ways?
James Byrd’s murderer had insurmountable evidence against him. There wasn’t a shred of evidence proving Troy Davis guilty. So the two aren’t even comparable. Therefore, there is no hypocrisy or double standard in supporting Davis while having no sympathy for Byrd’s killer.
Donna, I suspect a whole lot of people shared your conflict. I certainly saw the weird irony in the juxtaposition of the two executions. But, if you feel there’s a place for the death penalty, then surely one can oppose Troy Davis’s death and feel Brewer’s is justified, for the reasons the commenter above pointed out.
I’ve opposed the death penalty all of my adult life and would abolish the practice within the next hour if it was within my personal power. However, if I did favor capital punishment, Lawrence Brewer and John King—the two who were, by their own admissions (along with their friend, Shawn Allen Berry) responsible for the ghastly and racially poisonous death of James Byrd Jr.—would be among those highest on my list for execution. People who rape and kill children are likely the only ones who would rate higher in my book.
Life's a complicated affair, that’s for damn sure.
The very acronym for the “SAFE” Act, California’s latest effort to abolish the death penalty, is bogus. The costs claimed by SAFE are exaggerated and the costs of the “SAFE” Act’s life imprisonment would be much more expensive due to life-time medical costs, the increased security required to coerce former death-row inmates to work, etc. The amount “saved” in order to help fund law enforcement is negligible and only for a short period of time. (It is nothing more than a bribe in a vain effort to obtain conservative votes.) Bottom line, the “SAFE” Act is another attempt by those who are responsible for the high costs and lack of executions to now persuade voters to abandon it. Obviously, the arguments of the proponents of the SAFE Act would disappear if the death penalty was carried forth in accordance with the law. Get the facts at http://cadeathpenalty.webs.com.