Troy Davis to Die Next Week: Will Georgia Execute an Innocent Man?

By Michelle Garcia, Amnesty International Magazine. Posted September 17, 2008.

Editor's Note: Troy Anthony Davis faces execution on September 23rd. Go here to learn more.

Prison Boulevard begins on a lonely Georgia highway and sweeps across lush grounds and a serene lake populated with ducks. One might expect a sprawling ranch house at the end of this country road in Jackson, but there rises instead the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification prison, a mammoth institution whitewashed to a glare. To reach death row inmates, visitors traverse a series of yellow iron gates opened and shut in a chain reaction until they arrive at a guard holding open a heavy door. Inside the long, narrow cell waits Troy Anthony Davis -- a man condemned for the 1989 murder of a Savannah police officer, and an international cause -- wearing a prison-issue white and blue uniform, electric blue sneakers and a wide smile.

A smile alarmingly disarming, jarring even, amid the banging echoes from unknown corners. Davis, tall, broad and bald at age 39, settles on a stool and begins to speak with a Georgia drawl and gesticulate, and then he's drawing maps with his finger in the air and diagramming the August night two decades ago that landed him on death row.

"I have to remember," says Davis emphatically. "Every day of my life, I have to remember, to save my behind."

Last year, just 23 hours before Georgia officials would have executed Davis by lethal injection, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a temporary stay of execution amid doubts about Davis' guilt. By then the Savannah Morning News had gone to the presses with reports of Davis' final meal, the standard prison supper. Peach state and U.S. publications in other parts, however, published articles and editorials cautioning that Georgia was preparing to execute a possibly innocent man. The disparity in coverage mirrored the extreme regionalism characteristic of the death penalty debate and exposed growing fault lines between local support and attitudes across the rest of the state and nation.

In Jackson, Davis throws open his arms and invites, "Ask me anything; I have nothing to hide." He recalls the evening nearly two decades ago that changed his life, during a time when crack cocaine was the rage and murders weren’t the solely the grist of true crimes tours through Savannah's elegant neighborhoods or the garden of good and evil.

In 1991 a jury sentenced Davis to death for the August 19, 1989, murder of Savannah police officer Mark Allen MacPhail in a Burger King parking lot. Without a weapon or any physical evidence, prosecutors relied largely on eyewitness testimony to persuade a jury that Davis was the killer. In the years since, seven witnesses -- including eyewitnesses -- have recanted or contradicted their earlier testimony. Some said they fingered Davis as the killer under pressure from police.

Since 2000, however, federal courts have denied his appeals for a new trial, saying they are hamstrung by federal legislation passed after his conviction that limits death row appeals. In March the Georgia Supreme Court rejected his appeal for a new trial. In the 4--3 ruling, the court said, "One who seeks to overturn his conviction for murder many years later bears a heavy burden to bring forward convincing and detailed proof of his innocence."

Davis' fate now falls to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, which can consider his appeal for clemency and commute his sentence to life without parole once an execution date is set, likely by the end of the year. His attorneys have also filed a habeas corpus petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, but as one of thousands of petitions the Court receives each year, his chance for a reprieve is remote.

Yet the Davis' case and its trajectory within the court system are drawing intense scrutiny from afar, especially since the publication last year of a 35-page report and a campaign by Amnesty International that propelled Davis from relative obscurity to a cause backed by celebrities, politicians and religious leaders, including the Pope. In July, the European Union Parliament urged the United States to grant Davis a retrial. Proponents of the death penalty, no less, have rallied against his impending execution. William Sessions, former director of the FBI, cautioned that executing Davis without considering his evidence would be "intolerable." Even former U.S. Representative and current Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr (R-GA) weighed in. "True conservatives, as much as the most bleeding heart liberals, should be unafraid to look carefully at such cases," wrote Barr in an August 2007 op-ed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Troy Davis' life is at stake; but so is the credibility of our criminal justice system."

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