Stay granted for Troy Davis!

Troy and his Mother

Just an hour and a half before Troy Davis' scheduled execution last night, the US Supreme Court stepped in and granted a stay until Monday September 29th! The court will decide whether or not to hear Davis' appeal on Monday.

Thank you to all who took action with us to stop this injustice. We hope the US Supreme Court makes the right decision next week. In the mean time, please continue to contact the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles as they can grant clemency at any time.

For updates, please visit http://www.amnestyusa.org/troy
Thanks for you support!

US Supreme Court Order

(ORDER LIST: 554 U.S.)
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2008
ORDER IN PENDING CASE
08-66 DAVIS, TROY A. V. GEORGIA
(O8A241)
The application for stay of execution of sentence of death
presented to Justice Thomas and by him referred to the Court is
granted pending the disposition of the petition for a writ of
certiorari. Should the petition for a writ of certiorari be
denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event
the petition for a writ of certiorari is granted, the stay shall
terminate upon the issuance of the mandate of this Court.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

'Where is the justice for me?'
The case of Troy Davis, facing execution in Georgia

I think this country would be much better off if we did not have capital punishment... I really think it's a very unfortunate part of our judicial system and I would feel much, much better if more states would really consider whether they think the benefits outweigh the very serious potential injustice, because in these cases the emotions are very, very high on both sides and to have stakes as high as you do in these cases, there is a special potential for error.

US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens

Introduction

Troy Anthony Davis has been on death row in Georgia for more than 15 years for the murder of a police officer he maintains he did not commit. Given that all but three of the witnesses who testified against Troy Davis at his trial have since recanted or contradicted their testimony amidst allegations that some of it had been made under police duress, there are serious and as yet unanswered questions surrounding the reliability of his conviction and the state's conduct in obtaining it. As the case currently stands, the government's pursuit of the death penalty contravenes international safeguards which prohibit the execution of anyone whose guilt is not based on "clear and convincing evidence leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts".

Amnesty International does not know if Troy Davis is guilty or innocent of the crime for which he is facing execution. As an abolitionist organization, it opposes his death sentence either way. It nevertheless believes that this is one in a long line of cases in the USA that should give even ardent supporters of the death penalty pause for thought. For it provides further evidence of the danger, inherent in the death penalty, of irrevocable error. As the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court wrote in 1993, "It is an unalterable fact that our judicial system, like the human beings who administer it, is fallible." Or as a US federal judge said in 2006, "The assessment of the death penalty, however well designed the system for doing so, remains a human endeavour with a consequent risk of error that may not be remediable."

The case of Troy Davis is a reminder of the legal hurdles that death row inmates must overcome in the USA in order to obtain remedies in the appeal courts. In this regard, Amnesty International fears that Troy Davis' avenues for judicial relief have been all but closed off. In particular, he is caught in a trap set by US Congress a decade ago when it withdrew funding from post-conviction defender organizations in 1995 and passed the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996.


Troy and his Sisters


This report outlines the case of Troy Davis. Executive clemency will be his last hope if the courts prove unwilling or unable to provide a meaningful remedy. Time is running out.

The inescapable risk of error

A legal regime relying on the death penalty will inevitably execute innocent people -- not too often, one hopes, but undoubtedly sometimes. Mistakes will be made because it is simply not possible to do something this difficult perfectly, all the time. Any honest proponent of capital punishment must face this fact.

Thirty years after the USA resumed executions, any notion that the US capital justice system is free from error or inequity should by now have been dispelled. A landmark study published in 2000, for example, concluded that US death sentences are "persistently and systematically fraught with error". The study revealed that appeal courts had found serious errors -- those requiring a judicial remedy -- in 68 per cent of cases. The most common errors in US capital cases were "(1) egregiously incompetent defense lawyers who didn't even look for - and demonstrably missed - important evidence that the defendant was innocent or did not deserve to die; and (2) police or prosecutors who did discover that kind of evidence but suppressed it, again keeping it from the jury." The study expressed "grave doubt" as to whether the courts catch all such error.

In Troy Davis' case, his appeal lawyers have argued that his trial counsel failed to conduct an adequate investigation of the state's evidence, including allegations that some witnesses had been coerced by the police, or to present full and effective witness testimony of their own (the prosecution presented 30 witnesses in total, the defence presented six). They have also claimed that the state presented perjured testimony as well as evidence tainted by a police investigation which had used coercive tactics, including against children taken into custody for questioning. As shown below, alleged police coercion is a common theme that emerges from the affidavits that various witnesses have provided since the trial when recanting earlier statements.

Perhaps the starkest indicator of the fallibility of the US capital justice system is the fact that since the US Supreme Court approved new death penalty laws in 1976, more than 100 individuals have been released from death rows around the country on grounds of innocence. The cases of people like Anthony Porter -- who came 48 hours from execution in 1998 after more than 16 years on death row in Illinois before being proved innocent by a group of journalism students who happened to study his case -- stand as an indictment of a flawed system. In April 2002 in Illinois, the 14-member Commission appointed by the governor to examine that state's capital justice system in view of the number of wrongful convictions in capital cases there, reported that it was "unanimous in the belief that no system, given human nature and frailties, could ever be devised or constructed that would work perfectly and guarantee absolutely that no innocent person is ever again sentenced to death".


US Supreme Court

In similar vein, in January 2007, after a process in which it held five public hearings and took evidence from a wide range of witnesses, a Death Penalty Study Commission established by the New Jersey legislature recommended abolition of the death penalty in that state. The Commission had failed to find any compelling evidence that the death penalty served any legitimate penological purpose, and it concluded that only abolition could eliminate the risk of irreversible arbitrariness and error. New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission Report, January 2007.

Yet still some maintain that exonerations of condemned inmates are a sign of the system working. Among those who have perpetuated this myth is US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Such exonerations, he has contended, demonstrate "not the failure of the system but its success". Justice Scalia added:

"Like other human institutions, courts and juries are not perfect. One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly. That is a truism, not a revelation. But with regard to the punishment of death in the current American system, that possibility has been reduced to an insignificant minimum."

It is disturbing that anyone, let alone a Justice of the Supreme Court, should consider as "insignificant" the risk of wrongful convictions in capital cases given what is known about the repeated failures of the system. The risk was not insignificant to the more than 100 individuals sentenced to death since 1976 who spent, on average, more than nine years between conviction and exoneration.(11) Factors that contributed to these wrongful convictions include prosecutorial or police misconduct and inadequate legal representation.

Of particular relevance in Troy Davis's case is the question of the reliability of the witness testimony used by the state to send him to death row. The problem of unreliable witness testimony as a source of error in capital cases has long been recognized. For example, a major study published in 1987 found that:

"By far the most frequent cause of erroneous convictions in our catalogue of 350 cases was error by witnesses; more than half of the cases (193) involved errors of this sort. Sometimes such errors occurred in conjunction with other errors, but often they were the primary or even the sole cause of the wrongful conviction. In one-third of the cases (117), the erroneous witness testimony was in fact perjured."

In addition, "clear injustices perpetrated by the police compose nearly a quarter of the errors" identified in this study. The majority of the error attributable to the police came in the form of coerced statements, with the remainder accounted for by negligence and over-zealous police work. Such misconduct was a major contributor to the wrongful conviction of four Illinois death row inmates, who were pardoned by the state governor in 2003 on the basis that their confessions had been tortured out of them by the police. The final report of the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission, released on 2 January 2007, noted the fallibility of eyewitness testimony in reaching the conclusion that "the penological interest in executing a small number of persons guilty of murder is not sufficiently compelling to justify the risk of making an irreversible mistake". For these and other reasons, the Commission has recommended abolition of the death penalty in New Jersey.

The problem of unreliable witness testimony, some of it exacerbated or caused by police misconduct, has been illustrated in a number of the other cases of those released since 1976 from death rows in the USA on the grounds of innocence. For example:

Thomas Gladish, Richard Greer, Ronald Keine and Clarence Smith were exonerated in 1976 in New Mexico two years after being sentenced to death. A newspaper investigation uncovered perjury by the prosecution's key witness, perjured identification given under police pressure, and the use of poorly administered lie detector tests.


The way we were - Electric Chair at Sing Sing

Earl Charles was sentenced to death in Georgia in 1975 and was on death row for three years before being exonerated. At his trial, two eyewitnesses identified him as the murderer. However, it was later revealed that the police had used suggestive photo line-up techniques and not revealed that the eyewitnesses had pointed to others in the line-up as possible suspects.

Larry Hicks was acquitted at a retrial in 1980, two years after being sentenced to death in Indiana. At the retrial, evidence showed that eyewitness testimony that had been used against him at the original trial had been perjured.

Anthony Brown was acquitted at a retrial in Florida in 1986. Three years earlier he had been sentenced to death on the basis of evidence from a co-defendant who received a life sentence. At the retrial, the co-defendant admitted that his original testimony had been perjured.

Neil Ferber was released in 1986, almost four years after he was sentenced to death in Pennsylvania. The state declined to retry him after, among other things, it emerged that a jailhouse informant had given perjured testimony at the first trial.
Timothy Hennis was acquitted at a retrial in North Carolina in 1989, three years after being sentenced to death for murder. At the retrial, the defence discredited the witnesses who had testified at the original trial and pointed to a neighbour of Hennis who could have been responsible for the crime.

Charles Smith was acquitted in 1991 in Indiana, eight years after being sentenced to death. At the retrial, the defence presented evidence that witnesses at his original trial had given perjured testimony.

Federico Macias was sentenced to death in Texas in 1984 on the basis of the testimony of a co-defendant and jailhouse informants. His conviction was overturned, a grand jury refused to indict him again because of lack of evidence. He was released in 1993.

Walter McMillian was released in Alabama in 1993, six years after being sentenced to death. His conviction was overturned after it was shown that three of the state's witnesses had given perjured testimony.

Ronald Williamson was released in 1999. He was sentenced to death in Oklahoma in 1987. Among other things, his trial lawyer had failed to question the motive of a jailhouse informant who alleged that Williamson had confessed to the murder.
Steve Manning had charges against him dropped in 2000. He had been sentenced to death in Illinois in 1993 on the basis of the word of a jailhouse informant who testified that Manning had confessed to him in jail.

Charles Fain was released in August 2001 after charges against him were dropped. He had been sentenced to death in Idaho in 1983. The evidence against him included the word of two jailhouse informants, who said that Fain had confessed to the murder.
Joseph Amrine was released in Missouri in 2003, 17 years after being sentenced to death for murder on the basis of the testimony of fellow inmates, who later recanted their testimony.(16)

Alan Gell was acquitted in North Carolina in 2004, six years after being sentenced to death. At his retrial, the defence presented evidence that the state's two key witnesses had lied at the original trial.