Mark Tran
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday September 23 2008 12:46 BST
Amnesty International today urged the US state of Georgia to stop the execution of Troy Davis, who faces death by lethal injection tonight despite doubts over his conviction.
Las July, the state's board of pardons and paroles stopped the execution less than 24 hours before it was to be carried out.
However, it yesterday rejected pleas to reconsider its recent decision to deny clemency on the grounds that so much uncertainly exists over whether Davis shot and killed a Savannah police officer.
Georgia's supreme court also denied Davis's request for a stay of execution, and his last hope of avoiding execution at 7pm local time (midnight BST) now appears to rest with the US supreme court, where his lawyers have asked for a stay of execution.
In a case that has attracted international attention, Pope Benedict XVI and the former US president Jimmy Carter have asked for the sentence to be commuted to life in prison without parole.
Davis, a 39-year-old African-American, is on death row for the murder of officer Mark MacPhail in 1989, but seven key prosecution witnesses have recanted their testimonies since his 1991 trial and post-trial testimony implicating another man as the gunman has emerged.
A "jailhouse informant" retracted his incriminating account of Davis' supposed confession, while several other supposed eyewitnesses later took back their trial evidence while insisting they had been under "a lot of pressure" from police to provide signed statements.
One witness, Antoine Williams, a Burger King employee who identified Davis as the gunman at the trial, later said: "Even today, I know that I could not honestly identify with any certainty who shot the officer that night. I couldn't then either.
"After the officers talked to me, they gave me a statement and told me to sign it. I signed it. I did not read it because I cannot read."
Chatham County prosecutors, however, are sure that Davis killed MacPhail, who rushed to a Savannah Burger King car park late at night after hearing the screams of a man who was being pistol-whipped.
Prosecutors say that MacPhail, a 27-year-old father of two, was shot down by Davis before he could draw his weapon. They say Davis then stood over the fallen officer and fired again and again.
Davis has admitted being at the scene, but has always denied shooting MacPhail. No physical evidence against him has ever been produced, the murder weapon has never been found and the case against him at trial consisted entirely of witness testimony.
Georgia's board of pardons says it has extensively studied and considered the case, including hearing from every witness presented by Davis's lawyers, retesting the state's evidence and interviewing Davis himself.
"After an exhaustive review of all available information regarding the Troy Davis case, and after considering all possible reasons for granting clemency, the board has determined that clemency is not warranted," a board spokeswoman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.
Since its resumption of executions in 1977, the US has executed 1,118 prisoners, 42 of them in Georgia.
Meanwhile, more than 100 people have been released from death rows around the country, many in cases in which witness testimony has been exposed as unreliable.
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