The execution is scheduled for today (Wednesday) at 7:00 pm Georgia time, by lethal injection. Pending stay (see below), it will occur.
NY Times:
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.Click the links to see the news articles. The family of the slain police officer consider themselves the real "victims", not Mr. Davis.
This case has attracted worldwide attention, but it is, in essence, no different from other capital cases. Across the country, the legal process for the death penalty has shown itself to be discriminatory, unjust and incapable of being fixed. Just last week, the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for Duane Buck, an African-American, hours before he was to die in Texas because a psychologist testified during his sentencing that Mr. Buck’s race increased the chances of future dangerousness. Case after case adds to the many reasons why the death penalty must be abolished.
The grievous errors in the Davis case were numerous, and many arose out of eyewitness identification. The Savannah police contaminated the memories of four witnesses by re-enacting the crime with them present so that their individual perceptions were turned into a group one. The police showed some of the witnesses Mr. Davis’s photograph even before the lineup. His lineup picture was set apart by a different background. The lineup was also administered by a police officer involved in the investigation, increasing the potential for influencing the witnesses. ... Studies of the hundreds of felony cases overturned because of DNA evidence have found that misidentifications accounted for between 75 percent and 85 percent of the wrongful convictions. The Davis case offers egregious examples of this kind of error.
The Times obviously disagrees. Please read the entire article for all of the reasons why. They are legion.
About a stay, over at emptywheel.net, the practicing lawyer bmaz offers a ray of hope — Antonin Scalia and the Supreme Court. Scalia and the Court have put their fingerprints on two stays of execution recently, with another case upcoming that turns on much the same material as the Troy Davis case. The trick appears to be (as my non-lawyerly mind reads it) crafting the appeal:
The common wisdom, and repeated meme in the press, is that there is no remaining available judicial path for Troy Davis. But this may not necessarily be true. There are paths left to be pursued, even if narrow and dimly lit. And in an imminent execution situation, anything and everything must, and will, be pursued. The dedication, intensity, selflessness and never say die, literally, attitude of death penalty lawyers is legendary. If you have not seen them in action, you don’t know, but it is a thing of beauty.bmaz discusses the relevance of Perry to the Troy Davis case. His analysis is a good (and timely) read.
Here is but one possible path, among many, which could possibly be attempted in one form or another by the Davis defense team. There has just, quite recently, been a fairly landmark study released on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Granted, the AJS study pertains to eyewitness testimony as related though police lineups, but it is further concrete evidence of a changing landscape in how the unreliability of eyewitness identification in general is treated, and the picture is quite disturbing as to lack of reliability and veracity.
Now the issue of eyewitness identification infirmity has been reviewed before in the case of Troy Davis, but not in the bright new light emerging recently. And there is one other important difference now. The Supreme Court has scheduled for oral argument on November 2, 2011 the seminal eyewitness ID case of Perry v. New Hampshire.
Mr. Davis has again refused his "last meal" on the grounds that it won't be his last. Here's hoping — both for his sake and the sake of the nation, as it climbs up from barbary and its Southern roots.
Those roots nourish strange fruit indeed.
GP
