THE US Supreme Court has taken the rare step of ordering a federal judge to consider a condemned man’s claim of innocence.
Georgia prisoner Troy Anthony Davis has mounted a global campaign to declare he was wrongfully convicted of murder and barred by federal law from presenting the evidence that would prove it.
The court interrupted its summer recess to order a new hearing to determine “whether evidence that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes” Davis’s innocence.
Davis has come close to execution several times since he was convicted of the 1989 killing of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark Allen MacPhail. The case has spawned a national and international following, interest from Amnesty International and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and support from Pope Benedict and ex-president Jimmy Carter.
Monday’s court decision comes amid complaints from federal judges that a law passed by Congress in 1996 to streamline the death penalty appeals process keeps them from getting to questions of innocence raised by condemned petitioners.
In Davis’s case, liberal Judge Rosemary Barkett of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit criticised the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act’s (AEDPA) “thicket of procedural brambles”, as well as her court’s decision that the law barred Davis from presenting what he said is new-found evidence.
“AEDPA cannot possibly be applied when to do so would offend the constitution and the fundamental concept of justice that an innocent man should not be executed,” Barkett wrote in dissent.
Davis’s lawyers filed a petition directly with the Supreme Court after lower federal courts said that, because he could point to no constitutional defects in the trial he received, he could not present new evidence that would show his innocence. Davis says that seven of the nine key witnesses have recanted their testimony against him. He claims that the man who was the key witness against him was the actual shooter.
Justice Antonin Scalia objected to the court’s decision to order a new hearing, an “extraordinary step” he said the court had not taken in nearly 50 years. Joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, he called the action a “fool’s errand” and a “confusing exercise that can serve no purpose except to delay the state’s execution of its lawful criminal judgment”.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who countered Scalia’s dissent in an opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, said the “substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing”. He suggested that it would be “arguably unconstitutional” for the federal law to not provide relief for a death row inmate who has established his innocence. – (LA Times-Washington Post service)