Posted on 09/21/2011 9:10:07 PM PDT by Borough Park
(CBS/AP) JACKSON, Ga. - Georgia executed Troy Davis on Wednesday night for the murder of an off-duty police officer, a crime he denied committing right to the end as supporters around the world mourned and declared that an innocent man was put to death.
Defiant to the end, he told relatives of Mark MacPhail that his 1989 slaying was not his fault. "I did not have a gun," he insisted.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Liberals are sad.
How many appeals did this scum get?
Excellent news to start the day! Thanks.
But that is the very definition of government, so what she's really saying is, "Let's annihilate society all together," simply because it is imperfect.
Regardless of whether you support any application of capital punishment in this day and age, or whether you think Mr. Davis was guilty or innocent or deserving of death or not, everyone ought to accept the basic principle that the government has the right and power to execute.
And Rick Perry helped Bush tie the guy to the pick up's bumper.
The only witnesses who fully recanted were two who recanted by affadavit but then were not put forward to offer live testimony by Davis at the evidentiary hearing, most likely because their recantations were written by lawyers and wouldn’t hold up under cross-examination. The other was a jailhouse snitch whose original testimony at trial didn’t match the large number of eyewitnesses who testified. In other words, he was lying at trial, so his recantation may be real, but it doesn’t matter because he wasn’t believable in the first place. Here are the people who “recanted”:
Antoine Williams - never said that his statements to police were false, but simply said he couldn’t remember what he said. He also claimed that he was pressured to say that Davis was the shooter, but at the evidentiary hearing, he backed off that claim and said nobody pressured him to say anything. He also said that his memory would have been better closer in time to the crime.
Kevin McQueen - the jailhouse snitch
Jeffery Sapp - a friend of the defendant. He recanted his prior testimony that Davis had confessed to him, but the judge found him not to be credible. For instance, he claimed not to know what RAH stood for, although long ago he had testified that it stood for Rough As Hell.
Darrell Collins - he recanted but did not recant his identification of Davis as the man in the white shirt. Because all the witnesses consistently agreed that the man in the white shirt was the shooter, the judge took this as a confirmation of Davis’ guilt. Plus, Collins never said that Davis was the shooter, and the judge made the point that if Collins’ testimony were truly coerced as he claimed, then surely he would have been coerced to claim Davis was the shooter.
Harriett Murray - recanted in an unnotarized affadavit, begrudgingly obtained, where she wouldn’t even wait for a notary to be found to swear to her affadavit. This recantation was only on a minor point - that she now thinks that the person who argued with Mr. Young was the one who slapped him and shot the officer. At trial, the person arguing with Young was a different person than the one who slapped him and shot McPhail. Oh, and Murray died before the evidentiary hearing, so she couldn’t testify in person. The judge made an important point - if she had any idea that her affadavit would result in an innocent man being released, she surely would have allowed them to get a notary. The judge took that to be an indication that she wasn’t really recanting at all in her identification of Davis as the shooter.
Dorothy Ferrell - completely recanted by affadavit, but Davis did not call her to testify at the evidentiary hearing despite the fact that she was there and waiting to be called. Because she had no connections to Davis at all, the judge actually said that she “should have been” his “star witness” if he’d called her to the stand. That raises questions about why she was not called to the stand.
Larry Young - the man who was assaulted that led to the shooting. He claimed that his testimony at trial was coerced. Again, his affadavit of recantation held little value, in the judge’s mind, because he was available to testify at the evidentiary hearing and was not called as a witness.
The overwhelming evidence is that Davis was the shooter, and the facts at the trial made that very clear. The recantations and other “evidence” offered by Davis do not exonerate him.
I’m a bit unsettled about this one... didn’t some of the witnesses change their accounts of what happened?
Disregard... Post #66 answered my question.
Wrong. It was the Ruger AC-556, a select fire version of the Mini-14. Stenbridge Gun Rental sold 12 A-Team functional (blanked) guns to Long Mountain Outfitters in the early 1990s when CA was on an anti-gun tear and really hurt a great company. Dan Shae sold all but one IIRC.
Who cares what Tehy wants. The A-Team wants Justice!
Some inconvenient facts:
But then there is Officer MacPhail himself and what the defense all too conveniently forgets to bring up. Officer MacPhail “testified” at Troy Davis’s murder trial. See, MacPhail, an Army Ranger and police officer was working a second job that night as a security guard. He chased Davis and Sylvester Coles, who were assaulting a homeless man over a beer.
MacPhail reported in that he had run passed Sylvester Coles. MacPhail was shot from the front in the chest and face — not from behind where Coles was, but from the front where MacPhail himself located Troy Davis.
And then, if we really want to get into the weeds and talk about facts, consider this fact. Troy Davis immediately became the suspect and fled. Police roped off his house, obtained entry, and searched the home. In the laundry they found Troy Davis’s shorts from that night with evidence on the clothing directly tying him to Officer MacPhail’s murder — Officer MacPhail’s blood.
According to Darrell Collins, who is now recanting everything or claiming not to remember anything, Davis admitted to Collins that Davis had shot MacPhail in the chest and then went back to shoot MacPhail in the head at close range because MacPhail had seen his face — hence MacPhail’s blood on Davis’s shorts. Oh, and at the time Collins gave his statement way back in 1989 it was not public knowledge that Officer MacPhail had been shot in the chest and then at close range in the face.
Of course, this justice system that is supposedly about to carry out a travesty of justice ordered Davis’s shorts excluded as evidence from the trial because the police did not get a search warrant. So anti-death penalty advocates can conveniently say there is no physical evidence by discounting the gun, the casings, and ignoring Officer MacPhail’s blood on Troy Davis’s clothes found in Troy Davis’s laundry all because the very same court system that found him guilty without that physical evidence followed the law and excluded it.
We agree on that, Ann Coulter knows how to clear it up and make sense. Guilty! Thanks Ann.
Amen.
They couldn't gel "Big Al" for all his murders ..but, they got him on taxes and that's what's important...got is got.
LOL..well, it was certainly Bush's fault!
His crime deserved what he got.
That said, hate crime laws represent an insidious example of policies that promote a grossly un-American activity of unequal justice. It incentivizes law enforcement and the Justice Depts to investigate and prosecute more vigorously crimes against certain selected groups of people and less vigorously against others. Typically if one is prosecuted for a hate crime the media will tend to pressure the system to find guilt instead of innocence. America can thank the ADL and SPLC and many in Congress for the travesty of making justice special for some, and less special for others.
Maybe they could have left out using the sodium thiopental, so the prisoner would suffer more.
I believe the manic behavior of these anti-death penalty freaks is a subconscious reaction to their pro-abortion zealatry.
So, it appears the perps actual defense was that he didn’t have the gun. Anyone part of a crime in which someone is killed or injured is equally guilty. As the global warming nuts like to say that is “settled” law.
I’d like to know what Davis did—if anything—to stop the killing. I would certainly consider that mitigating evidence. But none of his brain dead supporters presented anything like that, did they?
Oh, and it absolutely doesn’t mean a thing to these idiots that the USSC looked at the case and upheld his conviction. How do they explain it? Of course they can’t—especially as Thomas was part of the decision. So what do the justice loving leftists do? They do what they always do. They threaten to hurt—or worse—people who disagree with them and they get away with it.
***In this particular case, several witness have recanted, and there’s not any substantial forensic evidence. I think they may have executed an innocent person.***
Have you not read any of the actual trial documents?
Physical evidence? How about his gun was used to shoot 2 people (the police officer being one) and both shootings were linked by physical evidence, the shell casings at both scenes were forensically proven to have been fired by the same gun.
Or how about Davis’s clothing being found covered in the officer’s blood? That was entered into evidence in the trial but disallowed because when Dais was arrested, the police searched the rest of his house, but didn’t have a search warrant.
There weren’t “9” witnesses, there were over 30, and more than a few knew Davis personally.
Also, the jury was so divided that they took all of 2 hours to come back with a guilty verdict. Nearly a record time for a death penalty trial.
These records are public information. What the news, politicians, and hollywierds are spouting are lies based on fantasy.
I bet he didn’t suffer as much as the cop did when he died or as much as the cop’s family has.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.