Today, Troy Davis gets his day in court.
Davis was convicted of the 1989 killing of a police officer, Mark MacPhail. Since his trial, seven of the nine witnesses have come forward and recanted, with several saying they were pressured by police into fingering Davis -- one now points to the ninth witness as the real murderer. The incident brought some much needed scrutiny to the general (and generally unknown) unreliability of eyewitnesses. Just to put this in perspective, three-quarters of those exonerated by DNA testing by the Innocence Project were wrongly identified by eyewitnesses. There is no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime.
Davis has come close to being executed (once his execution was put off two hours before his lethal injection was scheduled to go through), but last August the Supreme Court voted to force a Georgia District Court to reconsider the facts of the case and to make a finding as to Davis' innocence. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were the sole dissenters in the 6-2 decision (Sonia Sotomayor did not vote) in which Scalia argued that “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.” Most people would not describe a trial in which most of the witnesses said they lied or were coerced by police as "free" or "fair," but then again most people don't have the Founding Fathers as imaginary friends. MacPhail's family has also maintained they want Davis executed, but most people understand that the state doesn't have a compelling interest in the ritual execution of a potentially innocent man on the basis that it might grant the surviving victims of the crime some emotional closure.
I'd revisit the argument over Scalia's remarks, but I think they speak for themselves. The judge isn't expected to rule anytime soon.
-- A. Serwer
