Davis execution scheduled; 7 witnesses have recanted

A convicted cop killer who witnesses now say maybe didn’t do it was scheduled Wednesday to be executed later this month for the 1989 murder of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark Allen McPhail.

Troy Anthony Davis stands to be the 21st person to die by lethal injection, on Sept. 23, assuming the state carries out the planned execution of Jack Alderman one week earlier. Alderman’s execution date of Sept. 16 was set Tuesday for the 1974 murder of his wife, also in Chatham County.

While both Alderman’s and Davis’ cases are controversial, Davis’ carries with it questions of guilt that have already raised concerns among the members of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Twenty-four hours before Davis was scheduled to be executed July 17, 2007, the Parole Board stopped it for at least 90 days. The board wanted to know more about the witnesses who recanted their testimonies.

Nine witnesses testified in the 1991 trial that they saw Davis shoot the 27-year-old McPhail as he lay in a downtown Savannah Burger King parking lot.

Seven of the witnesses now say they aren’t sure who they saw shoot McPhail, and Davis’s lawyers say they have evidence exonerating him and at the same time implicating another as the killer.

Those revelations have drawn support for Davis from Amnesty International, Hollywood celebrities, civil rights activists, the European Parliament and Pope Benedict XVI. Amnesty International said in a news release it had collected more than 100,000 letters and petition signatures in support of Davis.

Still, court after court — most recently the Georgia Supreme Court — has refused to grant Davis a new trial. Only one petition, for a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, remains pending.

Davis’ attorney, Jay Ewart of the Washington law firm Arnold & Porter, said he will focus most of his efforts on persuading the Parole Board to grant clemency.

“We think the Georgia Pardons and Parole board is the fail safe,” Ewart said. “We have somebody sitting on Death Row … who is innocent.”

Efforts to reach McPhail’s relatives Wednesday were unsucessful, but in the past they have said the delays have frustrated them and broken their hearts.

“You hear time heals all wounds,” MacPhail’s sister Kathy McQuary has told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Not exactly true. It kind of dampens it, but when something like this comes back up, it’s like reliving it all over again.”

For several months, there was a de facto nationwide moratorium on executions while the U.S. Supreme Court considered a Kentucky case that challenged the constitutionality of lethal injection, the method used in Georgia and 35 other states.

In April, the high court upheld the commonly used three-drug “cocktail,” and Georgia executed two men in May and June.

Between those two executions, the Georgia Parole Board commuted to life without parole the sentence of a third man, David Crowe, just 2 1/2 hours before he was to die after hearing from his attorneys that Crowe regretted his crime.

Parole Board spokeswoman Scheree Lipscomb said Wednesday no time has been scheduled for either Davis’ or Alderman’s attorneys to make pleas to the board.

On Wednesday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Alderman’s argument for a trial on the constitutionality of lethal injection, which the Supreme Court decided earlier this year.

The federal appeals court based in Atlanta said Alderman waited too long to bring a lawsuit that claimed condemned inmates could be tortured because the sedative dosage given as the execution begins is not enough, and because the people carrying out the lethal injection are not adequately trained.