Update June 1st : NYTimes - Bob Barr
Georgia is set to execute a man who may
well be innocent
Sunday, May 17th 2009, 4:00 AM Hear Troy himself
The State
of Georgia has been trying to
execute Troy Anthony
Davis for more than 15 years, despite compelling evidence that he
did not commit the murder for which he is sentenced to die.
Davis has
been to death's door three times - most recently, he was 90 minutes from
execution - rescued each time by heroic lawyering. But his luck may be running
out.
A 30-day
stay of execution expires this weekend, prompting Amnesty
International and other human rights groups to declare Tuesday a
global day of action - a time for those who hate injustice to raise our voices
and save this man's life.
You can
get details of protests, poetry readings, letter-writing campaigns and
information about the case at www.aiusa.org/troy or by texting "Troy"
to 90999.
In August
1989, Davis and a running buddy named Sylvester (Red) Coles spent a riotous,
hell-raising night in Savannah.
Eyewitnesses say Coles shot at two of his neighbors at a house party with a
chrome .38 pistol, hitting and wounding one.
Davis
wasn't at that party. But he and Coles met later and wound up in the parking
lot of a Burger King
next to Savannah's Greyhound bus
station, where one of them harassed and pistol-whipped a homeless man.
When the
man yelled for help, a cop named Mark McPhail - who was
moonlighting as a security guard at the bus station - came running, and was
shot to death at point-blank range.
The murder
weapon was never recovered, but ballistics showed it was a .38-caliber handgun.
Coles, the
owner of a .38, wasn't charged. Instead, nine eyewitnesses testified at trial that
Davis was the shooter.
But seven
of the nine have since recanted their testimony, with several signing sworn
statements that they were coerced by cops.
One
recanting witness, Dorothy Ferrell,
said in a sworn statement that "I was scared that if I didn't do what the
police wanted me to do, then they would try to lock me up again. I was on
parole at the time."
And here's
witness Darrell Collins:
"I was only 16 ... After a couple of hours of the detectives yelling at me
and threatening me, I finally broke down ... They would tell me things that
they said had happened and I would repeat whatever they said."
And so it
went with seven of the nine witnesses.
Of the
remaining two, one initially told police under oath that he didn't know who
shot McPhail - then reversed himself on the witness stand two years later,
certain that Davis was the culprit.
The only
other eyewitness is Coles, who went to the police the day after the shooting,
accompanied by a lawyer and claimed Davis was the killer.
Coles
never mentioned that he'd been carrying a .38-caliber pistol that night.
"[The
police] bought Mr. Coles' story hook, line and sinker," Davis' attorneys
argued in court. "And they went out into this community, and they rounded
up witnesses everywhere they could find them, and they paraded them in
here."
Three new
witnesses now claim they heard Coles later take credit for the murder. But none
of the new witnesses or sworn recantations have ever been heard in any court -
and probably never will be.
The U.S. Supreme
Court turned down the case last fall, and last month a federal
appeals court voted, 2 to 1, to deny Davis a hearing to present new evidence.
The judges
who rejected Davis cited a failure to plead his innocence early enough to
satisfy the deadlines set out in the federal Anti-Terrorism
and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 - a law that cuts short the
number and time of appeals. So Davis gets no chance to plead his case.
In effect,
he is facing the death penalty for filing his papers late.
The only
remaining hope is a pardon from Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue
- an act of mercy we should all demand on Tuesday, or however long it takes to
rescue Davis from an unjust death.
elouis@nydailynews.com
