Save Troy Anthony Davis: Georgia is set to execute a man who may well be innocent

The State of Georgia has been trying to execute Troy Anthony Davis for more than 15 years, despite compelling evidence that he did not commit the murder for which he is sentenced to die.

Davis has been to death's door 3 times - most recently, he was 90 minutes from execution - rescued each time by heroic lawyering. But his luck may be running out.

A 30-day stay of execution expires this weekend, prompting Amnesty International and other human rights groups to declare Tuesday a global day of action - a time for those who hate injustice to raise our voices and save this man's life.

You can get details of protests, poetry readings, letter-writing campaigns and information about the case at www.aiusa.org/troy or by texting "Troy" to 90999.

In August 1989, Davis and a running buddy named Sylvester (Red) Coles spent a riotous, hell-raising night in Savannah. Eyewitnesses say Coles shot at 2 of his neighbors at a house party with a chrome .38 pistol, hitting and wounding one.

Davis wasn't at that party. But he and Coles met later and wound up in the parking lot of a Burger King next to Savannah's Greyhound bus station, where one of them harassed and pistol-whipped a homeless man.

When the man yelled for help, a cop named Mark McPhail - who was moonlighting as a security guard at the bus station - came running, and was shot to death at point-blank range.

The murder weapon was never recovered, but ballistics showed it was a .38-caliber handgun.

Coles, the owner of a .38, wasn't charged. Instead, 9 eyewitnesses testified at trial that Davis was the shooter.

But 7 of the 9 have since recanted their testimony, with several signing sworn statements that they were coerced by cops.

One recanting witness, Dorothy Ferrell, said in a sworn statement that "I was scared that if I didn't do what the police wanted me to do, then they would try to lock me up again. I was on parole at the time."

And here's witness Darrell Collins: "I was only 16 ... After a couple of hours of the detectives yelling at me and threatening me, I finally broke down ... They would tell me things that they said had happened and I would repeat whatever they said."

And so it went with 7 of the 9 witnesses.

Of the remaining 2, one initially told police under oath that he didn't know who shot McPhail - then reversed himself on the witness stand 2 years later, certain that Davis was the culprit.

The only other eyewitness is Coles, who went to the police the day after the shooting, accompanied by a lawyer and claimed Davis was the killer.

Coles never mentioned that he'd been carrying a .38-caliber pistol that night.

"[The police] bought Mr. Coles' story hook, line and sinker," Davis' attorneys argued in court. "And they went out into this community, and they rounded up witnesses everywhere they could find them, and they paraded them in here."

Three new witnesses now claim they heard Coles later take credit for the murder. But none of the new witnesses or sworn recantations have ever been heard in any court - and probably never will be.

The U.S. Supreme Court turned down the case last fall, and last month a federal appeals court voted, 2 to 1, to deny Davis a hearing to present new evidence.

The judges who rejected Davis cited a failure to plead his innocence early enough to satisfy the deadlines set out in the federal Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 - a law that cuts short the number and time of appeals. So Davis gets no chance to plead his case.

In effect, he is facing the death penalty for filing his papers late.

The only remaining hope is a pardon from Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue - an act of mercy we should all demand on Tuesday, or however long it takes to rescue Davis from an unjust death.

Source: Opinion, New York Daily News, May 18, 2009