His innocence plea was rejected by The Supreme Court on Monday.
Once President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI, Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Georgia Congressman and 2008 Libertarian Party nominee for president Bob Barr, and former FBI Director and judge William S. Sessions spoke out for Davis. Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts argued that sympathy for the family does not by itself lead to justice. But today I’m finding far too little written about his case.
The Supreme Court, without a noted dissent, on Monday cleared the way for the state of Georgia to carry out the execution of Troy Anthony Davis of Savannah, rejecting five different ways that Davis’s lawyers had sought to press his claim that he did not commit a 1989 murder of an off-duty policeman. In three brief orders, none of which contained any explanation, the Court brought to a sudden end a two-decades-long campaign to spare Davis’s life, on the theories that most of those who testified against him have recanted and that another man did the killing, and has since admitted it. …
The Davis case is one of the most highly visible cases amid scores of them in recent years, claiming wrongful convictions, especially in murder cases. The most unusual fact of the Davis case was that, for the first time in nearly a half-century, the Supreme Court itself explicitly ordered a federal judge to go over the evidence to test Davis’s claim that he did not commit the crime that occurred in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant and bus station in Savannah on the night of August 19, 1989.
That judge wound up ruling that Davis “is not innocent.” Because of what that judge and the Eleventh Circuit Court had done later in the case, Davis’s last hope was in the Supreme Court itself. But, after examining at one Conference the complex array of maneuvers his lawyers had attempted, the Justices simply rejected all of them. Although no dissents were reported, that does not necessarily mean that all nine Justices agreed with the outcome. In fact, two of the Justices, Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, had joined in a comment in August 2009 that there was in this case “a substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death.”
I’ve followed this case for a very long time and have come to believe that Troy Anthony Davis is innocent.
REMEMBER: The innocence hearing begins; Troy loses.
THE OTHER SIDE: The D.A. on why the trial was fair and Davis deserves to die. Fuller remarks behind a paywall here. My post on that here.