After years of heartbreak and disappointment, Troy Davis is finally getting a chance to have evidence heard in his case after being denied a fair trial since he was arrested almost two decades ago.
After years of heartbreak and disappointment, Troy Davis is finally getting a chance to have evidence heard in his case after being denied a fair trial since he was arrested almost two decades ago.
It should never have taken the American justice system this long to act.
Troy Davis was unjustly convicted and sentenced to die in 1991 for the murder of Mark MacPhail, an off-duty policeman who was shot while working a second job as a security guard at a Burger King in Savannah, Ga.
There was no physical evidence linking Troy to the crime and seven of the nine witnesses recanted or contradicted their testimony, citing police coercion. One witness, a 16-year-old, said police threatened to hold him as an accessory to murder, warning that he would “go to jail for a long time and I would be lucky if I ever got out because a police officer got killed.”
Of the two eyewitnesses who stuck to their stories, Sylvester “Redd” Coles was himself considered a suspect in the killing. The other initially told police he could not identify the shooter.
Brenda Forrest, one of the jurors, summed it up: “If I knew then what I know now, Troy Davis would not be on death row. The verdict would be not guilty.”
Yet the courts stubbornly refused to hear Troy’s claims of innocence. After numerous legal rounds the U.S. Supreme Court on Aug. 17, in a 3-2 decision, finally took the extraordinary step of ordering the U.S. District Court in Georgia to consider and rule on Troy’s claim of innocence – a directive the high court hasn’t issued in almost 50 years. But it’s not justice yet. The standard of proof in the evidentiary hearing turns our criminal justice system on his head. Troy will be expected to prove his innocence rather than for the state to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. We hope that this unfair burden of proof does not once again deny Troy the fair hearing all Americans deserve.
Hundreds of thousands of people have rallied to Troy’s cause. There were the well-known, like former President Jimmy Carter and actor Danny Glover. There were the unexpected, like former FBI director William Sessions and conservative Congressman Bob Barr. And there were the people all over the world galvanized by organizations like ours and Amnesty International who signed petitions and raised the visibility of the injustice of Troy Davis. Our Georgia branch tirelessly fought in the trenches, knocking on doors, holding marches, preaching in Georgia’s churches to bring the travesty to the light.
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