By the time you read this — Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011 — Troy Davis may already have been executed in Georgia. On Aug. 19, 1989, Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer in Savannah, Ga., ran across a parking lot to help a man being pistol-whipped. The man holding the handgun then fatally shot MacPhail.
Davis was arrested for the crime, charged, convicted and given the death penalty. A Georgia pardons board rejected his appeal for clemency this past Monday, much as other pardons boards and appeals courts have rejected Davis’ claims of innocence over the years.
That hasn’t prevented Davis from gaining a plethora of supporters, mainly opponents of capital punishment, during the last two decades. I must have received a dozen emails over the past week urging people to sign a petition demanding that the state of Georgia commute Davis’ sentence of death to life in prison.
Among Davis’ supporters are the usual gaggle of lefties, but some surprising conservative voices have spoken out for him. One is former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, who no one is going to accuse of being even a moderate, much less a liberal.
Former FBI Director William Sessions wrote an op-ed piece for the Savannah Morning News saying there are too many doubts about the Davis-MacPhail case to justify executing Davis. Supporters of Davis mainly cite two things to bolster their claim that he’s innocent.
Seven of nine witnesses who testified against Davis, they claim, have recanted their testimony. And there is no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime.
Google the name “Troy Davis” and you’ll come across a host of websites making those claims that supposedly prove Davis’ innocence.
But being the skeptic that I am — the first rule of journalism tells me to check my own mother’s story if she tells me she loves me — I kind of had the sneaking suspicion that both sides of this Davis-MacPhail story were not being told. And I was right.
It took me a while, but I managed to track down Spencer Lawton Jr.’s op-ed piece in the Savannah Morning News. Lawton is the district attorney for Chatham County in Georgia, where Savannah’s located. The title of his op-ed piece is “Lawton: Troy Davis verdict correct.”
Davis’ supporters are indeed entitled to their own opinions about his innocence. But they are not, as the saying goes, entitled to their own facts. And one of the first things Lawton did in his op-ed piece was to challenge one of the opinions Davis’ supporters have sworn is gospel truth.
“Davis’ advocates have insisted that there was no physical evidence in this case,” Lawton wrote. “This is not true.
Crime lab tests proved that the shell casings recovered from the shooting of Michael Cooper at a party earlier in the evening were fired from the same weapon as the casings recovered from the scene of Officer Mark MacPhail’s murder. Davis was convicted of shooting Cooper.”
Lawton was less convincing in his assessment of the recanting witnesses, suggesting they might have been paid or coerced, but he offered a compelling argument about a man named Sylvester Coles.
Davis’ supporters claim it was Coles, not Davis, who killed MacPhail.
“Davis’ advocates,” Lawton wrote, “are eager to condemn Coles based on evidence far weaker than their characterization of the evidence against Davis.”
Lawton said MacPhail sprinted by Coles to stop the man pistol-whipping the homeless man.
“This makes Davis the only one with a motive for shooting MacPhail,” Lawton wrote. “Yet Davis’ lawyers argue to condemn Coles for shooting MacPhail. Why would he?”
Why indeed.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
