Sydney Carton

Apr 20 2009, 03:00 PM

Now the claim that he is "actually innocent" is made. Now. Did he just think of this?
SC
Tid,cool down;you are apparently still feeling so hot on this issue that you have furthermore failed to assimilate p. 3 :
"Davis then filed his first federal habeus corpus petition on Dec.14,2001...The district court DID NOT RULE ON HIS ACTUAL INNOCENCE CLAIM,instead searching the merits of his constitutiional claims and denying his petition." ,Pp.22-24 which apparently greatly impresses you is the only Federal review of the evidence which Davis has ever had.
Read it again and you will find that two of the three justices concerned did not even find it necessary to discuss eighteen of the nineteen affidavits concerned apart from the extremely brief(and highly inaccurate) consideration they gave to the recanting seven.
The mighty two might have at least have considered the affidavit of Joseph Washington(Washington gave his statement at the very earliest stage of the case and he has never varied it over twenty years despite the pereennial intimadation of the entire state of Georgia) that he saw Red Coles gun down Officer MacPhail.
The two(pp.33-34) in the end are reduced to the evidence of four witnesses:
"The jury chose to believe Coles [The leaned judges do well to use the past tense...for the living jurors have spoken and they no longer believe Coles.]...Coles continues to implicate Davis[The judges really went overboard on this one.Coles has refused to say anything since the original trial.The prosecution chose not to produce Coles at the State Board hearings and has never in twenty years submitted an affidavit from him regarding the testimony of some dozen witnesses who,between 1993 anfd 2001 directly incriminated him.And,after twenty years, two of these three judges now take some unidentifiable hearsay from Coles as additional grounds for sending Davis to his death!];"and the testimony of Larry Young and Valerie Coles conflicts with Davis".
Larry Young is the homeless man[I trust he's found a home by now]
who has most emphatically repudiated his trial "identification".How does he still contradict Davis? Young still says he heard only one man --the shooter --speak to him.Davis has always said that he twice asked Coles to lay off Young.
Young was admittedly semi-intoxicated,down on the ground,being beaten and had a gun on him.It is quite possible under such circumstances that he failed to hear may be four syllables like "lay off" but two of three judges find Young's aauditory lapse incredible and cite it as evidence why Davis must die.
Oh, yes,there is still Valerie Coles,Red's sister.And obviously since the judges have just gone on record as to what a credible guy Red is how could they possibly fail to be impressed by his sister.They sound like a lovely a pair as Travis and Crystal.
Personally I rather prefer the dissent by the only one of the three judges who felt morally obligated to consider the twenty-six affidavits
subnitted against the total of four witnesses cited by the majority:
"When considered altogether the evidence significantly undermines the evidence presented by the State at trial" p.46

Quote:

 

Because Davis failed
to raise these constitutional claims before the state court, he sought to overcome
his procedural default of these claims by showing under Schlup v. Delo, 513 U.S.
298, 115 S. Ct. 851 (1995), that he should be able to raise these claims anyway
because he was actually innocent of the underlying murder.1 The district court did
not rule on his actual innocence claim, instead reaching the merits of his
constitutional claims and denying his petition.
Notably, Davis did not raise a substantive freestanding claim of actual
innocence in his first federal habeas petition.