Legal News

Another Odd Twist in an Already Odd Death Penalty Case

By Ashby Jones

How’s this for a strange twist in the Troy Davis saga: the Georgia death-row inmate exhausts his appeals after 20 years, but Georgia prosecutors still can’t schedule his execution.

Why not? Because federal regulators have seized the state’s entire supply of a key lethal injection drug.

Click here for the AP story; here and here for earlier LB posts about Davis, who in 1989 was convicted of murdering a Savannah police officer but had been given a rare chance to argue his innocence.

The Supreme Court on Monday denied Davis’s final appeal, which ordinarily would pave the way for an execution date. But as the AP story explains, federal regulators this month seized the state’s entire stockpile of sodium thiopental, a sedative used in the three-drug lethal injection cocktail, amid questions about how the state obtained it.

That means prison officials can’t schedule Davis’ execution until the Drug Enforcement Administration concludes its investigation or Georgia switches to another drug.

Mark MacPhail was working off-duty at a Savannah bus station on Aug. 19, 1989, when he was shot twice after rushing to help a homeless man who had been attacked. Eyewitnesses identified Davis as the shooter at his trial, but no physical evidence tied him to the slaying. Davis was convicted of the murder in 1991 and sentenced to death.

Davis has long claimed he could clear his name in MacPhail’s death if a court would give him the chance to hear new evidence. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2009 agreed he should be able to argue his innocence, a rare chance afforded no other American death row defendant in at least 50 years.

During two days of testimony in June, U.S. District Judge William T. Moore Jr. heard from two witnesses who said they falsely incriminated Davis and two others who said another man had confessed to being MacPhail’s killer in the years since Davis’ trial.

But Moore concluded in August that several of the witnesses had already backed off their incriminating statements during the 1991 trial - so it wasn’t new evidence - and that others simply couldn’t be believed.

Davis sought to appeal Moore’s decision, but the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hear the challenge in November.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 28, 2011 (boomark / email).