Appeal denied in high-profile US death row case

WASHINGTON—The US Supreme Court rejected on Monday the last-ditch legal appeal of death row inmate Troy Davis, clearing the way for the execution of a man who has become a cause celebre for campaigners against capital punishment.

Davis, a 42-year-old convicted of murdering a police officer in the southern state of Georgia in August 1989, had been seeking a new trial after seven of the nine witnesses against him recanted their testimony.

Davis has escaped three dates with death due to last-minute maneuvering, but has now exhausted all legal avenues and the Supreme Court decision clears the way for him to be executed as early as the second week of April.

With its racial overtones – Davis is black and the police officer, Mark MacPhail, was white – and the prisoner’s unrelenting claims of innocence, the case has triggered an international outcry.

Critics have included the European Union, whose member states oppose the death penalty, as well as former US president Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Pope Benedict XVI.

“It appears that the justice system is comfortable allowing someone to be executed when there are lingering doubts about guilt in the case,” Laura Moye, a spokeswoman for rights group Amnesty International, told AFP.

At 19, Davis was accused of shooting dead MacPhail, a young police officer who was off-duty when he intervened in a scuffle in a fast-food restaurant in Savannah, Georgia between a homeless man and a group of others.

No murder weapon was found, nor was any DNA or fingerprints linking Davis to the crime. The conviction rested on the testimony of nine witnesses, seven of whom have recanted their testimony in the years since the trial.

“Because there was no physical evidence linking Davis to the murder, nor was there physical evidence exonerating him, the case rested on a group of witnesses whose credibility was readily accepted for conviction, but so easily rejected in the appeals process,” Amnesty said in a written statement.

After a series of failed appeals, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in August 2009 allowing Davis to present what he claimed was exculpatory evidence that was not reasonably available during his trial.

But the benchmark for success was high and after a June 2010 hearing in Savannah, judge William Moore ruled in August last year that Davis had not produced enough evidence to prove his innocence.

“Mr. Davis’s new evidence does not change the balance of proof from the trial. Of his seven ‘recantations,’ only one is a meaningful, credible recantation,” Moore wrote.

Monday’s Supreme Court decision means the state of Georgia is free to schedule a new date for the execution of Davis, who has been on death row since 1991.

Amnesty International’s Moye pleaded for a parole board in Georgia, Davis’s last hope of avoiding execution, to intervene.

“This is precisely their role, to step in in cases like this one when the judicial process has really failed, when the judicial process has basically said that it’s OK for an execution to proceed when there are doubts about innocence and guilt,” she said.

Georgia has executed 49 people since the Supreme Court reestablished the death penalty after a four year hiatus in 1976. The last execution in the state was on January 25 this year.

Davis’s execution could be scheduled as soon as two weeks time, Moye said, adding that Georgia didn’t have the drugs to carry out the lethal injection immediately.

US authorities last week seized Georgia’s imported stock of thiopental, the drug of choice for lethal-injection executions, because of questions about its origin.

Thiopental is part of a three-drug cocktail given intravenously to those condemned to death. It effectively puts the inmate to sleep, before two other drugs then paralyze their muscles and stop their heart.