There are PLENTY of sad stories of FALSE ARREST, WRONGFULL DEATH, & ERRONEOUS WARRENTS...here's one that has a bit happier, (though yet unresolved) tale to tell...NEVER GIVE UP...NEVER QUIT!
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Lethal Injustice: No New Trial for Death Row Prisoner Troy Davis Posted by: "Leroy Crenshaw" leroy@ix.netcom.com leroy4216
Thu Mar 20, 2008 10:27 am (PDT)
Written By: Liliana Segura,
AlterNet
Posted on March 20, 2008, Printed on March 20, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/80271/ Troy Anthony Davis is an innocent man on
Georgia's death row. His lawyers believe it, his
supporters believe it, even most of those who
sent him to die believe it. Accused of killing a
police officer in Savannah, Ga., in 1989, his
conviction was based solely on eyewitness
accounts from people who claimed to have seen
Davis, then 20 years old, shoot police officer
Mark Allen MacPhail to death in a Burger King
parking lot. No murder weapon was ever found and
no physical evidence linked him to the crime.
Nevertheless, he was found guilty in 1991 and
sentenced to die. Troy Davis would spend the next
decade and a half on death row insisting on his
innocence. Last summer, less than 24 hours before
his scheduled execution, someone finally listened.
On the night of July 16, 2007, Troy Davis was
facing death by lethal injection when he won a
last-minute stay of execution by the Georgia
Board of Pardons and Paroles. At a meeting that
day lasting more than six hours, numerous people
had asked the members of the board to spare
Davis' life, among them Atlanta representative
and civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis. In the
world outside, Davis had the backing of countless
anti-death penalty groups, Amnesty International,
a handful of celebrities, and the Pope. But
perhaps the most compelling support that day came
from five of the original witnesses who had
testified at Davis' trial. Sixteen years before,
they had taken the stand for the prosecution; now
they urged the board to save the life of an innocent man.
They were not alone. Of the nine original
witnesses in the trial who implicated Davis,
seven have recanted their testimony. Three of
those seven have signed statements contradicting
their identification of Davis as the triggerman.
Two others who made claims that Davis had
confessed to the murder later admitted they were
lying. And other witnesses have since identified
the shooter as another man altogether, a "thug"
by the name of Sylvester Nathaniel Coles, who
also happened to be one of the state's witnesses against Davis.
The Savannah police force has long defended its
investigation of the MacPhail murder, including
the veracity of the witness testimonies against
Davis. But as more and more details have emerged
about their claims, the more disturbingly clear
it has become that the police played a major --
and coercive role -- in building the case against
him. "There was a lot of pressure to get
somebody," one former officer told the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution last year. As happens all
too often with the murder of a white cop, it
didn't seem to matter whether that "somebody" was guilty or not.
The trial began two years to the day following
the death of Mark Allen MacPhail, on August 19,
1991. Davis was convicted and sentenced to die.
Ten years later, with Davis languishing on death
row, the case against him started to unravel.
Witnesses revised their stories, saying that they
had been pressured by police to implicate Davis;
in 2000 one woman named Dorothy Ferrell, who
during the trial had said she was "positive"
Davis was the killer, signed an affidavit
admitting that she had been on parole at the time
and, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reported, "feared she would be locked up again if
she didn't tell police what they wanted to hear."
In her statement she said: "I don't know which of
the guys did the shooting, because I didn't see that part."
A sample of other statements:
"I was totally unsure whether [Davis] was the person who shot the officer."
"I told them Troy confessed to me. None of it was true."
As the truth came out, a movement of support
formed around Davis -- but it would take his
imminent execution and a barrage of media
coverage for anyone in an official position to
step in. Weeks after Davis' brush with death, on
Aug. 3, 2007, on the basis of witness
recantations and other developments, the Georgia
Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal for new
trial for Troy Davis. Oral arguments took place
on Nov. 13. Four months later, this past Monday,
March 16, the court made its ruling: Troy Davis would not get a new trial.
In a 4-3 decision, the court decided that not
even the seven recanted testimonies were enough
to merit a new trial. "We simply cannot disregard
the jury's verdict in this case," wrote Justice
Harold Melton. Never mind that the jury was
working with hopelessly tainted evidence -- and
that two of the jurors have declared that if they
knew then what they know now, they would never
have voted to convict Troy Davis. As Chief
Justice Leah Ward Sears wrote in her dissent: "If
recantation testimony … shows convincingly that
prior trial testimony was false, it simply defies
all logic and morality to hold that it must be
disregarded categorically." But logic and
morality have little say in a system that straps
people to a gurney, outfits them with intravenous
lines and murders them with a lethal cocktail.
Once again, Troy Davis confronts this fate.
Even the most hardbitten death penalty lawyers
and activists were stunned by the court ruling.
Georgia defense attorney Chris Adams, a member of
Davis' defense team, called it "a heartbreaking
day." "I was very surprised by the decision on
Monday," he said over the phone on Tuesday
morning. "We felt that the proper course was to
hear all the witnesses … and then to make a
judgment call." Instead, the ruling means that
new evidence that could clear Davis will likely
never make it into the courtroom. To Adams, this
is a travesty. This case, an "actual innocence
case," is "the kind of case you go to law school
for," he said. "You would hope all your cases
would have this kind of significance -- or that none of them would."
Almost 20 years after his death, family members
of officer MacPhail remain unmoved by Davis'
strong innocence claims. On Tuesday, his mother
told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she
was satisfied with the Supreme Court's ruling. "I
wonder, what do all those witnesses remember
after 18 years?" MacPhail asked. "There is no new
evidence. No mother should go through what I have been through."
It's hard to imagine that recantations by seven
out of nine witnesses does not qualify as new
evidence. And few as of yet have seen fit to talk
to Davis' family about what they have been
through, living out this nightmare for 18 years.
Among them is Davis' sister, Martina Correia, a
courageous and outspoken activist on his behalf,
who is facing her own life or death struggle.
While her brother has been fighting for his life
on death row, she has been battling breast cancer.
On Monday, Martina stood on the Capitol steps in
Atlanta and reiterated her belief that justice
will prevail for her brother. "We have had years
of disappointment before, but we still have fight in us. We are not giving up."
The case of Troy Davis is a horrible miscarriage
of justice. But it can hardly be considered an
aberration. Not in the context of the criminal
justice system in Georgia, the only state in the
country that does not provide lawyers for death
row prisoners making final appeals. And not after
the passage, in 1996, of the Anti-Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act, which greased the
wheels of the country's execution machinery by
sharply curtailing avenues for appeals and
rendering new developments like the ones in
Davis' case too little too late. And certainly
not in the context of the 11th Circuit, whose
courts had no problem signing off on an execution
in Alabama in late January, while the rest of the
country has executions on hold pending a Supreme
Court decision on the constitutionality of lethal
injection. Davis is not just the victim of a
corrupt police investigation; he is the victim of
a system designed to railroad prisoners to the
execution chamber. What the Supreme Court ruling
shows in this case, says Adams, is that "the
rules really seem to favor finality over fairness."
Barring a successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme
Court, Davis will once again find himself at the
mercy of the state parole board. Asked if there
is reason to be optimistic given the board's past
attention to the revelations in his case, Adams
said, "Boy, you know, it's really hard to feel
optimistic about it today." But when it comes to
fighting for the life of an innocent man, there's
not much choice. "You've got to be optimistic."
