TROY DAVIS CASE: DISSENTS EXPOSE "LUCKLESS INNOCENTS" UTTERLY CLEARED BY DNA WHO FACE DEATH PENALTY TO INHIBIT APPEALS; BRILLIANT TOM TEEPEN COLUMN;

"ADD ALL THAT TO THE APPALLING FACT THAT DNA'S INCONTESTABILITY HAS REVEALED THAT OUR DEATH ROWS ARE RIDDLED WITH LUCKLESS INNOCENTS, MANY OF THEM VERY CAREFULLY AND VERY PROPERLY TRIED AND SENTENCED, AND YOU SEE A PROCESS THAT HAS BEEN EXPOSED AS IRREDEEMABLE."

TOM TEEPEN; COLUMNIST; COX NEWS; PHOTO: TROY DAVIS;

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Background: (Wikipedia); The Troy Davis case concerns the case of Troy Anthony Davis, a former sports coach from the U.S. state of Georgia, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1991 for the August 19, 1989 murder of off-duty Savannah, Georgia police officer Mark MacPhail. Throughout the trial and subsequent appeals, Davis maintained his innocence, claiming he was wrongfully convicted of the crime as a result of false identification. After the trial and first set of appeals, seven of the nine prosecution eyewitnesses who had linked Davis to the killing recanted or contradicted their original trial testimony, claiming police coercion and questionable interrogation tactics. The witness who first implicated Davis and has remained consistent, Sylvester "Redd" Coles, was initially a suspect in the crime. Coles was seen acting suspiciously the night of MacPhail's murder and has been heard boasting that he killed an off-duty police officer. There is only one witness who did not recant his testimony and is not himself a suspect in the murder, but he made an in-court identification of Davis two years after the crime.Davis opponents say Coles came back to the scene of the shooting with a female after police arrived. Davis changed clothes (even asking Coles for a shirt later) and fled to Atlanta with his sister. Davis has repeatedly asked the courts to examine the new exculpatory evidence, but so far has not been successful in persuading a majority of judges to grant him a new trial or conduct a hearing in which the recanting eyewitnesses could be cross-examined to determine the credibility of Davis’ innocence claims. In October 2008, Davis filed a second Habeas petition in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on the grounds that it was the first time Davis was presenting a free-standing innocence claim and that no court has yet held an evidentiary hearing on the exculpatory evidence of recanted testimony. On 16 April 2009 the three-judge panel denied Davis' petition on procedural grounds by a 2-1 majority. Amnesty International has strongly condemned the refusal of U.S. courts to examine the innocence evidence, and has organized rallies and letter-writing campaigns to persuade the Georgia and Federal courts to grant Davis a new trial or an evidentiary hearing. Many prominent politicians and leaders, including President Jimmy Carter,[6] Pope Benedict XVI, Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Presidential candidate Bob Barr, and former FBI Director and judge William S. Sessions have called upon the courts to grant Davis a new trial or evidentiary hearing. On 17 August 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court, over the dissenting votes of two justices, ordered a federal district court in Georgia to consider and rule on whether new evidence "that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes [Davis'] innocence."

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"The debilities of the U.S. system of capital punishment were obvious again recently when the Supreme Court, in a rare move, stayed the execution of a Georgia man and ordered the trial court to consider whether new evidence may show his innocence," Tom Steepen's Cox News August 21, 2009 column, under the heading "Kill the death penalty" begins;

"Our persistence with the needless and barbarous practice of capital punishment ought to count as a national shame. All but a handful of nations -- none of them pleasant company -- have long since dropped it," the column continues;

"The instant case concerns Troy Davis, convicted of the 1989 murder of an off-duty Savannah police office working as a bus station security guard. No weapon was ever found, no physical evidence linked Davis to the killing, seven of the nine witnesses against Davis have recanted and several witnesses have fingered instead the prosecution's chief witness.

The push for a new trial for Davis has won the backing of a long list of impressive supporters, including former President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Republican congressman Bob Barr, himself once a federal prosecutor, and William Sessions, former FBI director and judge.

Yet dissenting from the reconsideration granted by the high court, Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, called any rehearing a "fool's errand" and argued, "The court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

In other words, it's perfectly OK to execute an innocent if all the right boxes have been checked. Somehow, it is difficult to imagine James Madison giving a triumphant fist-pump at such faithfulness to his work.

A New York Times review of capital cases has found an increasing number of federal appellate judges dissenting from colleagues who uphold death penalties over claims of innocence -- and dissenting in increasingly strong and urgent language.

The culprit for many of those dissents is the federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The law was the product of one of those anticrime spasms of the sort that seize legislatures when one or two cases claim talk-show notoriety and elections near.

The idea was to stop capital defendants from pursuing appeals on new grounds and let the states get on with the business of killing them with stepped-up vigor, legislative Red Bull for hangmen. But the law itself is convoluted, unclear and, for any who still bother about the niceties of governance, a congressional trespass into properly judicial territory.

Add all that to the appalling fact that DNA's incontestability has revealed that our death rows are riddled with luckless innocents, many of them very carefully and very properly tried and sentenced, and you see a process that has been exposed as irredeemable.

Execution is a complete flop as a deterrent. Our execution rate, one of the world's highest, has not spared us one of the world's highest murder rates. And execution it is the one judicial mistake that, when it has been committed, can never be corrected.

Life without parole fully serves any possible concern for public safety.

Any other motive is unspeakable."

The column can be found at:

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=833589&category=OPINION


Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;