Yesterday, the Georgia Pardons Board denied clemency for 42-year old death row inmate Troy Davis, who now seems to be out of options in avoiding lethal injection.
Davis has been convicted for the murder of Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer shot to death in a parking lot in Savannah in 1989. He has since faced the death penalty a total of four times. In 2007, the state parole board granted him a stay as he was preparing for his final hours. A year later, an hour and a half before his execution, the Supreme Court stepped in and kept him from execution, but later refused to hear his case. A week before his third execution date, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of execution after his lawyer pushed to present new testimony that could prove his innocence. The court denied the claim but later granted Davis time to take his case to the Supreme Court. This past June, a Savannah federal district judge ruled that he had failed to demonstrate his innocence, and now it seems that Davis has run out of possible appeals.
Davis’s lawyers argued that the witness testimony was too tenuous to be credible and that the physical evidence presented was insufficient to merit an execution. If there is any kind of doubt cast on the validity of the conviction, Davis should not be sentenced to death. The methods by which the prosecutors and the police went about the conviction have also been called into question.
When doubts of this nature surround a high-profile case like this, an execution is simply out of the question. Mark MacPhail’s widow has commented on the conviction: “We have laws in this land so that there is not chaos. We are not killing Troy because we want to. We’re trying to execute him because he was punished.” But punishing a man by executing him when even a shred of doubt exists as to his guilt seems chaos much more than it does justice.
If there is a hint of a chance that Davis is innocent, his execution would simply equate to two senseless deaths, and this cannot and should not be tolerated in the American justice system.
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