Legal Heavyweights File Friend-of-Court Brief for Troy Davis

By Odette Yousef

Atlanta, GA – A prominent Harvard Law School professor hopes that a friend-of-the-court brief that he and 27 other legal heavyweights filed yesterday on behalf of Troy Davis will sway the U.S. Supreme Court. They hope the high court will give consideration to a petition for a writ of habeus corpus that Davis's lawyers filed on Tuesday.

WABE's Odette Yousef reports.

Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree took the lead on the brief:

OGLETREE: The point is that no court has ever conducted a hearing to make an assessment of the evidence of Troy's innocence. And to execute him in the face of this evidence of innocence, would not only be unconstitutional, but as a moral matter would be unconscionable.

The evidence that Ogletree refers to are the recantations of 7 of the 9 state witnesses that implicated Davis. Davis's lawyers' want the U.S. Supreme Court to order an evidentiary hearing at the district court level.

Ogletree says this plea on Davis's behalf is different from thousands of others, and should carry weight:

OGLETREE: When you see people like a Deputy U.S. Attorney General, two former state supreme court chief justices, federal judges, and states attorney generals, you get a sense that they all believe that the unified message is that Troy Davis has been denied an opportunity to have his day in court.

Davis was convicted in 1991 of killing off-duty Savannah Police Officer Mark Allen MacPhail.

Odette Yousef, WABE News.