Son believes victim forgotten in Davis case

Mark MacPhail Jr. has his father’s name and looks but no memory of him.

MacPhail, now 19, has a few mementos of his father —- his U.S. Army dog tags, photos that captured father and infant son together, a few seconds of his father’s voice recorded on a family reunion video. But not much else.

He missed out on “the father-son stuff, like learning how to shave,” he said. “Never had that father-son talk. Never heard ‘Chip off the old block. That’s my boy.’ “

“I didn’t have a father,” he said.

But now the younger MacPhail regularly sees reminders of his father and his violent death in the newspapers or on television. Mark MacPhail Sr.’s murder is brought up over and over again as part of the international controversy surrounding the death penalty appeals of Troy Anthony Davis.

Mark MacPhail Jr. was 7 weeks old in 1989, when his father, a Savannah police officer, was shot to death in a Burger King parking lot after he came to the rescue of a homeless man being pistol-whipped.

Davis was sentenced to death for murdering MacPhail. Since last year, Davis’ appeals have drawn attention from around the world. Pope Benedict XVI, former President Jimmy Carter, former FBI Director William S. Sessions and Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu all have called for mercy in Davis’ case.

Demonstrations were held weekly earlier this year, and they were renewed this week when a federal appeals court again listened to arguments for a new hearing by Davis’ lawyers. The arguments claim someone else shot the off-duty police officer, and Davis was blamed only because of police pressure.

There is no fixed date for the three-judge panel to rule. Whatever the panel’s decision, it is unlikely to be the last, since there are subsequent avenues to appeal.

MacPhail’s son, who’s studying pre-med in Savannah with plans to be a radiologist, said he doesn’t like all the furor, or the attention on Davis. Sometimes he feels consideration for his father seems an afterthought.

Yet the younger MacPhail has been reluctant to speak out, leaving it to his mother and aunt to respond publicly to each change in Davis’ off-and-on-and-off path to Georgia’s execution chamber. “Its all too fishy to me,” Mark MacPhail Jr. said.

MacPhail said he’s talked to the police officers who interviewed the witnesses who since claim they were coerced to implicate Davis. “I know these guys,” MacPhail said. “They assured me ‘We did not force them.’ My father trusted them and I trust them.”

He believes memories changed because of pressure from Davis’ lawyers and death penalty opponents. MacPhail said he remembers that when he was 3 or 4 years old, Davis’ lawyers visited the MacPhail home. His mother sent him to a friend’s house and told him not to talk to the lawyers.

“I’ve seen what they do to my family,” he said, “and how the media acts.”

MacPhail was with his family inside the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison near Jackson last September when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Davis’ second scheduled execution less than two hours before he was to die by lethal injection.

“They all looked to me and said, ‘What should we do, Mark?’ I was the youngest one there, and they looked to me,” he said. “I was a little angry [that the execution was stopped]. We had hoped it would end. It won’t end.”

Still, the younger MacPhail says that in some ways his age at the time of his father’s death makes the public nature of the debate surrounding Davis’ appeals easier to bear.

“I lucked out because I don’t have any memories, unlike my sister, who had time to spend with him and remembers him,” MacPhail said. “She misses him the most.”

His sister, Madison, was almost 2 when her father died. “Her pain is very real and always will be,” MacPhail said of his sister. “She can remember his smell. She can remember his sound. …

“She has memories, and she feels all the loss.

“I just feel the loss of memories.”