The Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole has denied clemency for death-row inmate Troy Davis.
Davis, who was convicted of the 1989 killing of Savannah, Georgia, police officer Mark MacPhail, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 7 p.m. Wednesday at a state prison in Jackson, Georgia.
The five-member parole board released the following statement Tuesday morning:
“Monday September 19, 2011, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a clemency request from attorneys representing condemned inmate Troy Anthony Davis. After considering the request, the Board has voted to deny clemency.”
Davis’ supporters, along with Amnesty International, have staged protest, rallies and organized petitions for the last several weeks leading up the hearing. Celebrities and politicians including President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Susan Sarandon, Harry Belafonte, and the Indigo Girls have also called for his clemency.
Amnesty International spoke out against the board’s decision.
“It is unconscionable that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has denied relief to Troy Davis. Allowing a man to be sent to death under an enormous cloud of doubt about his guilt is an outrageous affront to justice,” Amnesty International said in a statement Tuesday.
“Should Troy Davis be executed, Georgia may well have executed an innocent man and in so doing discredited the justice system.”
“In 2007 the Board vowed that no execution would go forward unless there was ‘no doubt’ about guilt, a vow that has now been rendered meaningless. To fail to re-examine the facts, including allegations about an alternate suspect, and allow this execution to go forward is an injustice to both the Davises and the MacPhails,” the statement said.
Davis has been scheduled to die three times before, most recently in October 2008, when the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay two hours before he was to be executed.
Since his conviction in 1991, all but two of the state’s non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted or changed their testimony.
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