The United State Supreme Court stopped the execution of Troy Davis today, less than two hours before he was supposed to be executed by lethal injection following a decision of the Georgia Supreme Court, that upheld Davis’ conviction for the murderer of an off duty police officer in Savannah, Georgia in August of 1989. http://www.ajc.com/cherokee/content/metro/stories/2008/09/23/davis_stay_execution.html

The conviction of Davis was based only on witnesses’ testimony since there was no physical evidence linking him to the murder and the murder weapon was never found. However since his conviction, seven out of nine non-police witnesses have recanted or changed their original version of the events from what they had first testified about at Davis’ trial. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/us-supreme-court-stays-georgia-execution-case-strong-evidence-innocence

As has been noted by Amnesty International USA, several of these witnesses have since signed sworn affidavits stating that they were originally pressured and coerced by police to sign affidavits or testify against Davis. One of the two individual non-police witnesses from the trial who has not recanted his testimony is an individual named Sylvester Coles. However nine other people have signed affidavits implicating Coles as the actual gunman responsible for the killing of the police officer. http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/troy-davis-finality-over-fairness/page.do?id=1011343&n1=3&n2=28&n3=1412.

According to the newspapers reports his family had already said their last goodbyes to him and Davis had already recorded his last statement, all this in the expectation that his execution would be completed as had been ordered by the Georgia Supreme Court.  I wonder how many times the men and women convicted of a capital offense have to die before they are actually killed.  I imagine these inmates die in their tormented dreams, in their imagination of how it will be when the execution actually happens. Their families also live the horror of the execution as many times as the struggle to preserve the inmates’ lives continue into the last stages of the appeal process by imagining how is it going to be when the visits to the prisons will not be necessary any longer because everything is finally over.  All these “rehearsals” for the real death must be even more horrible when the one living through these rehearsal of death is an innocent person.  According to statistics kept by Amnesty International USA  “Since 1973 more than 125 people have been released from death row throughout the country due to evidence of  their wrongful convictions.” http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-and-innocence/page.do?id=1101086&n1=3&n2=28&n3=99

Restrictions placed on the authority of federal appeals courts to reopen cases on appeal and designed to introduce more finality in decisions in capital punishment cases have not allowed Troy Davis to even have a hearing in a federal court on whether the witness testimony at his trial is reliable enough to impose the death penalty. http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/troy-davis-finality-over-fairness/page.do?id=1011343&n1=3&n2=28&n3=1412 What should be more important when you are dealing with the ultimate sanction of death - the consequences of which are irreversible even if we later determine we have made a mistake - the policy of promoting finality in sentencing or fairness in preventing an innocent from possibly being wrongly executed. I know on which side of that issue that I stand. The Davis petition to the U.S. Supreme Court raises the issue that the Supreme Court should decide whether the Eighth Amendment bars executions of convicted persons who likely could prove their innocence if given their chance to do so in court. In their petition to the Court, Davis’ attorneys wrote that the case, “allows this court an opportunity to determine what it has only before assumed: that the execution of an innocent man is constitutionally abhorrent.” http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/us-supreme-court-stays-georgia-execution-case-strong-evidence-innocence