Convicted of the 1989 killing of a Savannah police officer, Troy Anthony Davis is scheduled to be put to death in Jackson, Georgia at 7 p.m. on September 23. There is real reason to believe that he is being penalized for maintaining his innocence. He was denied clemency just six days before his Supreme Court hearing. He now faces near-certain death.
Mary Jean Goode, a retired nurse writing in the AJC today, says she’s pro-life. And as a citizen of Georgia she pleads do not kill in my name:
The burden of proof was circumstantial by all admission: no physical evidence of any description, no weapon, no fingerprints, no DNA. The conviction was made from the least reliable source: eyewitness accounts. Nine claimed to have seen Davis commit the crime. Seven recanted their testimony; two have not. One of those two is a suspect, and the other is a person who claimed to have seen no one do the shooting, but changed his testimony through interrogation. Troy Davis may not have proven his innocence at trial, but no one, with absolute certainty, has proven his guilt.
At a conference sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2002, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia responded to a question on whether he thought the death penalty would inevitably lead to the condemnation of someone who is innocent. In the transcript, he replied: “Well, of course it will. I mean you cannot have any system of human justice that is going to be perfect. And if the death penalty is immoral for that reason, so is life in prison. You think you’re not going to have innocent people put in prison for life? It’s one of the risks of living in an organized human society.” Later he ventured to say that he felt the innocent rarely received the death penalty.
When the Georgia Supreme Court agreed to hear Davis’s motion for a new trial, but then denied the motion (pdf) on technical procedural grounds, dissenting Chief Justice Leah Sears wrote:
I believe that this case illustrates that this Court’s approach to extraordinary motions for new trials based on new evidence is overly rigid and fails to allow an adequate inquiry into the fundamental question, which is whether or not an innocent person might have been convicted or even, in this case, might be put to death.
On Friday the Georgia parole board upheld the death sentence. In a state with one of the strictest open records laws — a state employee, you can look my salary up online — the death deliberations of the parole board are ‘state secrets’.
We’ll never know why they chose to proceed with the Davis execution while they chose to commute the sentence of Samuel David Crowe just hours before he was sentenced to die:
In March 1988, Crowe killed store manager Joseph Pala during a robbery at the lumber company in Douglas County, west of Atlanta. Crowe, who had previously worked at the store, shot Pala three times with a pistol, beat him with a crowbar and a pot of paint. […]
At Thursday’s hearing, his lawyers presented a dossier of evidence attesting to his remorse and good behavior in jail, according to local media reports. The lawyers also said he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms from a cocaine addiction at the time of the crime.
We do know that malicious unlawful convictions happen. And that in other instances the refusal to admit guilt has been given as cause for further penalizing inmates. Troy Anthony Davis has maintained his innocence throughout. Is he being put to death for maintaining that innocence while a clearly guilty man was given clemency for good behavior?
Why has his death been scheduled for less than a week before the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear his appeal? Even death penalty advocates should care when we kill a man despite the presence of actual reasonable doubt.