Word: davises
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Five years later, Congress, exasperated by the seemingly endless nature of death-penalty appeals, passed a law intended to speed the death-row journeys of prisoners like Davis. Optimistically called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), the new law attempted to limit death-row prisoners to one set...
Like most death-penalty cases, this story is maddening and convoluted. Davis was convicted in 1991 of a tawdry and pathetic 1989 murder. On a hot Savannah night almost exactly 20 years ago, Davis and two acquaintances were hassling a homeless man at a Burger King parking lot next to...
Anyone who has ever spent a few weeks on the police beat could guess what happened next. Coles blamed Davis. Davis fingered Coles. Investigators built a case from the available materials: ambiguous ballistics, jailhouse snitches, witnesses with grudges and the often unreliable observations of the sort of folks who need...
Still, a necessary fiction underpinning our justice system is the idea that juries get things right, and so over the years, the courts found no reason to overturn the verdict, in some instances rejecting Davis' appeals on purely procedural grounds. At one point, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles...
By a vote of 2 to 1, the panel ruled against Davis, and this is where the Supreme Court comes in. Numerous times since the 1996 law was passed, the high court has ruled that the limits imposed by the AEDPA are valid - when they restrict the lower courts. But...