INTERNET SOURCE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/troy-davis-guilty-as-charged/2011/03/04/gIQAh23BoK_blog.html?utm_term=.c6dcac5479e3
Troy Davis:
guilty as charged
By Charles Lane
September 22, 2011
Troy Davis’ execution is nothing to
celebrate. The only satisfaction it offers, if any, is the grim kind that comes
from knowing a killer got his just deserts.
Of course, to opponents of the death
penalty, every execution is an outrage. Davis’ supporters say this one is
worse: the deliberate state killing of a man despite evidence that he is
innocent.
If they’re right, Georgia and all of
America should be ashamed.
But they’re wrong: Troy Davis is
guilty.
How can I be so sure? After all,
former President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI, and former FBI director
William Sessions backed Davis. Prosecution witnesses have recanted their
testimony; scant physical evidence tied Davis to the crime.
But it’s one thing to argue your case
in the court of public opinion; it’s quite another to do so in a real court,
with sworn testimony offered and cross-examined by both sides.
And when Davis had that opportunity,
in a special hearing last year ordered by the Supreme Court, the judge rejected
his claim, declaring flatly that “Davis is not innocent.”
This saga
began the night of August 19, 1989, in Savannah, Georgia. Police officer Mark
MacPhail, moonlighting as a Burger King security guard, rushed to break up a
mugging in the parking lot. When the ensuing clash ended, MacPhail lay mortally
wounded by gunfire.
A number of witnesses identified Davis
as the man who stood over MacPhail and fired twice before fleeing. Based on
that testimony, a jury of seven blacks and five whites convicted him and
sentenced him to death in 1991.
Davis admitted being at the scene; but
he insisted that someone else pulled the trigger. In the years since his 1991
trial, he has submitted affidavits from seven witnesses who inculpated him at
trial but later said their testimony was either mistaken or coerced by the
police.
Davis’ appeals, state and federal,
failed – until August 2009, when the Supreme Court handed him a dramatic
victory. Citing a “substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death,” the court
overrode usual limits on death-penalty appeals, granted a stay of execution
and ordered a federal court in Georgia to weigh Davis’ evidence of innocence.
Chief Judge William T. Moore of the
U.S. District Court in Savannah, an appointee of President Bill Clinton,
convened the hearing in June 2010 -- whereupon Davis’ case crumbled. Much of
his “new” evidence had already been heard by the original trial jury. Some of
his witnesses fared badly on cross-examination, while prosecution testimony
stood up.
Davis’ lawyers declined to put two of
Davis’ purported recanting witnesses on the stand, though they were available –
one even waited outside the courtroom. Judge Moore quite logically found these
omissions “suspicious.”
Davis’ lawyers did not call the “real”
shooter; nor did Davis, with his life on the line, testify. Perhaps this
reflected his experience at trial, where he told his story to the jury, and the
jury did not believe it.
In August 2010, Moore issued a
174-page ruling, in which he picked apart Davis’ factual claims one by one,
concluding, “The vast majority of the evidence at trial remains intact.”
Davis’ supporters say Moore unfairly
required Davis to present “clear and convincing” proof of innocence, a high
standard. But Moore’s emphatic findings implied Davis’s case wouldn’t have passed
any test; it was, the judge wrote, “largely smoke and mirrors.”
I believe Moore because he is an
impartial authority who reviewed all the evidence in an appropriate forum – and
for whom a ruling against Davis was not necessarily the path of least resistance.
No one in Moore’s position would want an innocent man’s death on his conscience
if he could avoid it at all. The Supreme Court’s unprecedented intervention
signaled it wanted federal courts to go the extra mile to avoid a wrongful
execution. Certainly Moore would have been a judicial hero in many quarters if
he set Davis free.
But Moore did what he thought was
right -- and the Supreme Court, in deference to the judge’s mastery of the
facts and law, unanimously declined
Mr. Davis’ appeals in March.
The Davis case does raise legitimate
questions. Should authorities have even sought the death penalty in this case?
Though undeniably senseless and cruel, the murder of Mark MacPhail was an
unplanned act against a single victim. As I have argued elsewhere,
such offenses do not rank among the special crimes – mass murders, for example,
or terrorism – for which the death penalty should be reserved.
Among its other benefits, limiting the
death penalty more strictly to the “worst of the worst” would shrink the risk
of executing an innocent man.
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