Court Rebuffs Georgian on Death Row

A narrowly divided Georgia Supreme Court declined Monday to order a new trial for a man sentenced to death in the 1989 murder of an off-duty Savannah police officer, despite recantations by seven of nine witnesses who originally testified against him.

The convicted man, Troy A. Davis, 39, had collected affidavits from all seven of the recanting witnesses, some of whom said their trial testimony had been coerced by investigators who were under pressure to convict someone in that fatal shooting of a fellow officer.

But the court, in a 4-to-3 decision written by Justice Harold Melton, held that sworn testimony at the trial was more important than the later recantations, noting that some of the witnesses had said only that they no longer felt able to identify the gunman.

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Source: The New York Times

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