Fresh Loaf

Jim Galloway at the AJC’s Political Insider points us to an op-ed about longtime death row inmate Troy Davis in today’s New York Times by Bob Barr. The former Libertarian presidential candidate and Georgia congressman, who says he’s a death-penalty supporter, says Georgia might be about to execute an innocent man.

This threat of injustice has come about because the lower courts have misread the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a law I helped write when I was in Congress. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, I wanted to stop the unfounded and abusive delays in capital cases that tend to undermine our criminal justice system.

With the effective death penalty act, Congress limited the number of habeas corpus petitions that a defendant could file, and set a time after which those petitions could no longer be filed. But nothing in the statute should have left the courts with the impression that they were barred from hearing claims of actual innocence like Troy Davis’s.

It would seem in everyone’s interest to find out as best we can what really happened that night 20 years ago in a dim parking lot where Officer Mark MacPhail was shot dead. With no murder weapon, surveillance videotape or DNA evidence left behind, the jury that judged Mr. Davis had to weigh the conflicting testimony of several eyewitnesses to sift out the gunman from the onlookers who had nothing to do with the heinous crime.

…

I am a firm believer in the death penalty, but I am an equally firm believer in the rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution. To execute Troy Davis without having a court hear the evidence of his innocence would be unconscionable and unconstitutional.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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William Mize, the white supremacist convicted in 1995 of killing Eddie Tucker of Hull, Ga., last night was denied a stay of execution and request for appeal by the Georgia Supreme Court.

He’s scheduled to be executed by lethal injection tonight at 7 p.m.

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According to a press release from the court:

The Supreme Court of Georgia today issued a stay of execution for William Mark Mize to give the trial court judge time to rule on Mize’s Extraordinary Motion for New Trial. Chief Judge Lawton Stephens of the Western Judicial Circuit on Monday denied Mize’s request for a hearing on the motion, but he did not rule on the motion itself. An appeal to the state’s highest court is therefore premature.

In today’s order, the Georgia Supreme Court states the stay will automatically expire 24 hours after the judge rules. Mize, 52, was due to be put to death tonight at 7:00 p.m. by lethal injection for the 1994 murder of Eddie Tucker in Oconee County.

Some background on Mize from the Athens Banner-Herald:

Mize, who led a small group authorities said was related to the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted in December 1995 of killing 34-year-old Eddie Tucker of Hull.

In October 1994, a few members of the group – and Tucker, who had filled out an application to join – went into the Northwestern Oconee County woods, supposedly to camp, after Tucker and another group member failed to follow Mize’s orders to burn down a purported crack house in Athens.

Mize killed Tucker with a shotgun blast, prosecutors said.

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Despite key witnesses recanting their testimony, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on April 16 rejected longtime death row inmate Troy Davis’ request for a new trial — the latest and possibly last in a lengthy series of appeals.

“Davis has not presented us with a showing of innocence so compelling that we would be obligated to act today.”

— Judges Joel Dubina and Stanley Marcus, writing for the majority in their rejection of Davis’ request

“To execute Davis, in the face of a significant amount of proffered evidence that may establish his actual innocence, is unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

— Judge Rosemary Barkett, writing for the dissent

“I am disgusted, I am saddened by it, but I’m not deterred in my determination to fight for my brother.”

— Davis’ sister Martina Correia in an April 16 WTOCTV.com article

“We believe that justice will be served and the courts will do what they’ve done for the past twenty years and deny him.”

— Mark MacPhail Jr., the son of the police officer whom Davis was convicted of killing, quoted in the same WTOC-TV story

“You have to plan your own funeral: saying goodbye, your last meal, what to do with your body, who will be there to witness it.”

— Davis, describing his reaction to being read a death sentence in an April 14 conference call with his supporters, as reported in the Emory Wheel

(Photo courtesy Georgia Dept. of Corrections)

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Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, an umbrella coalition for organizations and individuals opposed to the practice, has condemned the Georgia Board of Prisons  and Paroles’ decision to deny Troy Davis clemency.

From Sara Totonchi, chair of the coalition:

“We are horrified and ashamed as Georgians to see our state revealing its bloodthirst by executing Troy Davis, when so many questions remain on whether or not he is innocent. Executing Troy Davis is callous, careless and irreversible.  The state should be slowing down to address the well-documented, serious problems with a system that irreversibly takes human life, rather than rushing to carry out an execution of a possibly innocent man. This case is proof positive that the death penalty should be abolished.”

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Troy Anthony Davis, a convicted cop killer from Savannah who’s been on death row for 17 years, is scheduled for execution Sept. 23 — despite a parade of witnesses who’ve recanted most of the testimony that incriminated him.

AJC.com reports on the execution date, though the story fails to mention that the state Board of Pardons and Parole basically has been waiting for Davis’s execution date to be set so that it can rule on whether to allow it. Already, the board indicated in a statement issued earlier this year that Davis’s death sentence is troubling:

“The members of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles will not allow an execution to proceed in this State unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused.”

Plus, if the board commuted this guy’s death sentence, it would be a travesty to allow Davis’s execution. Then again, the board did let this guy die.

(Photo courtesy of Department of Corrections)

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Greg Bluestein is a writer with the Associated Press, a former classmate of mine, and a familiar face if you cover anything in Georgia. He’s everywhere, one of the most dedicated journalists out there, and a great guy.

In what seems to be a stray from the norm for the AP, Bluestein was given the chance to write a first-person account of the night Curtis Osborne was executed.

And it’s one of the finer pieces I’ve read about such an event, rich with detail and back story and a glimpse into what a witness to an execution goes through to view the process. The story was posted on the Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty listserv.

Good work, Greg.

JACKSON, Ga. — I’ve never met Curtis Osborne, had hardly heard his name until the last few months. But we shared a powerful and unsettling bond Wednesday night, one that I’ll never forget. His eyes fixed on mine minutes before he took his last breath.

I’ve worked at The Associated Press for three years now and covered more than my share of doom and gloom. But I had never witnessed an execution.

When the chance came up to cover Osborne’s execution, I didn’t think too much about it. I saw it more as a duty than anything else.

But there was also something a bit more primal about it. Very few things we cover as legal reporters ever seem complete, ever seem final. Verdicts are appealed. Sentences can be shortened. Even laws get overturned. There was something unique, though, about a story that has an absolute end.

Click here to view the rest of the story and give the Macon Telegraph and AP pageviews to keep work like this going.

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Tonight’s scheduled execution of convicted murderer Samuel David Crowe — which would mark the second Georgia execution in two weeks — could actually be good news for death row inmate Troy Anthony Davis.

Over the past decade, Davis’s lawyers have been building a case that their client is innocent. Seven of the nine witnesses whose testimony was used to convict Davis of the 1989 murder of Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail later recanted. Other witnesses have come forward to say that another man confessed to the killing.

Davis narrowly missed an execution date last July. Less than 24 hours before he was to be put to death by lethal injection, he received a last-minute stay.

“With Georgia cranking up the executions again, I think we’re likely to see several more [execution] dates,” says Laura Moye, deputy director of the southern regional office of Amnesty International.

Ironically, the more executions that Georgia carries out, the better the chance that Davis’s life will be spared, according to death penalty expert (and outspoken opponent) Stephen Bright.

“Nobody wants to admit it, but everything’s a little bit political,” says Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights and a lecturer at Yale University. “If there have been some executions recently, it’s more likely, perhaps, that a case will be commuted than if there hasn’t been an execution.”

(Photo courtesy of Department of Corrections)

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