Supreme Court Orders a New Hearing for Death Row Inmate Troy Davis
In a highly unusual decision, a majority of Supreme Court justices yesterday ordered that a federal judge in Georgia must hear new evidence that lawyers for
Jul 31, 202024.8K Shares1.3M Views
Ina highly unusual decision, a majority of Supreme Court justices yesterday orderedthat a federal judge in Georgia must hear new evidence that lawyers for Troy Davis have been saying for years will prove his innocence.
Davis, as I’ve explained before, has been on death row in Georgia since 1989, when he was found guilty of killing an off-duty police officer based on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses. There was no physical evidence directly linking him to the crime, however, and seven of the nine witnesses have since recanted their earlier statements. Another man has also boasted of committing the crime and new witnesses have said that other man was the real perpetrator. Some of the original witnesses claim they were pressured by police to identify Davis.
Despite multiple hearings at various state and federal courts on the issue, every court until yesterday had decided that the new evidence should not be considered.
Those judges all apparently agreed withJustice Antonin Scalia’s dissent yesterday, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, in which he called the new hearing “a fool’s errand” and said: “This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”
While Ashby Jones of zyhe Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog todaycalls that a “fascinating question,” it’s a question that only a lawyer can love.
In fact, even Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, no flaming liberal, wrote in 1993 that “we may assume … that in a capital case a truly persuasive demonstration of ‘actual innocence’ made after trial would render the execution of a defendant unconstitutional and warrant federal habeas relief,” as Adam Liptak points outtoday in The New York Times.
Fortunately, a majority of justices on Monday decidedthat the possibility of “actual innocence” as demonstrated by the facts of Davis’s case was sufficient to require the federal judge to at least hear the evidence.
“The Court’s decision means that we may finally know whether Georgia sought to execute an innocent man and allowed the real perpetrator to escape,” said Virginia Sloan, president of the Constitution Project, which submitted a brief on Davis’s behalf.
Hajra Shannon
Reviewer
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