Eyewitness Testimony
Current Event in Criminal Justice
The Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony
The execution of Troy Anthony Davis on September 27, 2011, in Georgia has stirred new debate over the reliability of eyewitness testimony. Davis was convicted of the August 19, 1989 murder of police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia. Working a security guard at a Burger King, MacPhail was shot when he attempted to defend a man being assaulted in a nearby parking lot. At the trial seven witnesses testified that they had seen Davis shoot MacPhail, and two others testified that that Davis had confessed the murders to them. However, the murder weapon was never recovered. Ballistic evidence linked earlier shootings and bullets recovered at the scene to those of another shooting in which Davis was also charged. In 1991 he was convicted of murder and the earlier shootings. He was sentenced to death.
Davis maintained his innocence until his execution. At an evidentiary hearing order by the United States Supreme Court in June of 2010 the defense presented...
Some of these writings disavowed parts of prior testimony, or implicated Sylvester "Redd" Coles, whom Davis contended was the actual shooter. The state presented witnesses, including the police investigators and original prosecutors, who described a careful investigation of the crime, without any coercion. Davis did not call some of the witnesses who had supposedly recanted, despite their presence in the courthouse; accordingly their affidavits were given little weight by the judge. Evidence that Coles had confessed to the killing was excluded as hearsay because Coles was not subpoenaed by the defense to rebut it.
This case garnered worldwide attention by challenging the trust worthiness of bystanders who claimed they witnessed Davis shoot officer MacPhail. Davis's defense attorneys' asserted that witnesses who had identified him in court as a killer two decades ago had tried years later to recant…
