Court Stays Troy Davis' Execution in ‘Extraordinarily Rare’ Reprieve
A death row inmate who failed to win cert for his constitutional claim of actual innocence has received a stay of execution from the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Troy Anthony Davis claims he is actually innocent and, as a result, the Eighth Amendment bars his execution. On Friday, the 11th Circuit stayed the execution and told Davis’ attorneys to file briefs that address whether he can be executed even though his lawyers failed to discover evidence of actual innocence earlier, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
Davis is asserting the same Eighth Amendment claim before the 11th Circuit that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear, the New York Times reports. Seven of nine witnesses at Davis’ trial for killing a police officer have since recanted their testimony.
An inmate seeking to bring a habeas appeal on a claim on actual innocence usually must meet two burdens of proof. First, he or she must show that his lawyers could not have previously found the evidence now being asserted no matter how diligently they looked, the story says. Second, the inmate must show by clear and convincing evidence that no reasonable person assessing the new evidence would find the inmate guilty.
The appeals court asked the lawyers to address whether Davis can be executed if the lawyers can meet the second actual-innocence prong, but not the first due-diligence requirement, the Journal-Constitution story says.
Stephen Bright, a death penalty expert who heads the Southern Center for Human Rights, told the Associated Press that the 11th Circuit’s decision was surprising. “This is extraordinarily rare. The law is very demanding and the court of appeals is a very conservative court,” Bright told AP. “It’s just not something that one would expect from this court.”
The decision came the same day that ABA President H. Thomas Wells Jr. called on Georgia officials to “take all necessary steps to investigate Davis’ claim of innocence and proceed with caution before execution is carried out.”
Wells said eight recent ABA assessments of state death-penalty systems, including Georgia’s, found mistakes and errors are too common in the process.
