Word: deathly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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 of appeals in federal court. Despite the restriction, Davis raised a variety of constitutional issues in his trip through the federal courts. Along the way, his lawyers accumulated a stack of affidavits from the motley crew of witnesses and from snitches of their own recanting their trial testimony...
Under normal circumstances, it takes a case of national importance to rile the Supreme Court during its summer recess. But in the words of an old axiom about capital punishment, "death is different." And so, on a sleepy mid-August Monday, Aug. 17, the court - over a strong dissent - dusted off an antique tool, unused for nearly half a century, to force a new hearing into the slow-rolling fate of a Georgia death-row prisoner named Troy Davis. In the process, the court has opened up new questions about the death penalty: most crucially, how far the courts must...
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 the bus station. They wanted his beer, and one of the bullies - either Davis or a fellow known as Red Coles - clubbed the victim with a handgun. As it happened, an off-duty police officer, Mark MacPhail, was providing security at the restaurant. When he came running to the scene...
...available materials: ambiguous ballistics, jailhouse snitches, witnesses with grudges and the often unreliable observations of the sort of folks who need a burger at 1 a.m. The amalgam was enough to persuade 12 jurors that Davis was guilty, and because the dead man wore a badge, the sentence was death...
...substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification," wrote Justice John Paul Stevens, in an opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. "Simply put, the case is sufficiently 'exceptional' to warrant utilization of this Court's" power to intervene from on high. The court ordered a federal district judge in Georgia to examine all the conflicting evidence in the case and determine whether Davis is, in fact, innocent...