IN RE TROY ANTHONY DAVIS. ON PETITION FOR WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS. No. 08–1443. Decided August 17, 2009.
Cite as: 557 U. S. ____ (2009). JUSTICE STEVENS, with whom JUSTICE GINSBURG and JUSTICE BREYER join, concurring.
"JUSTICE SCALIA’s dissent is wrong in two respects.First, he assumes as a matter of fact that petitioner Davisis guilty of the murder of Officer MacPhail. He does this even though seven of the State’s key witnesses have re-canted their trial testimony; several individuals have implicated the State’s principal witness as the shooter; and “no court,” state or federal, “has ever conducted a hearing to assess the reliability of the score of [postconvic-tion] affidavits that, if reliable, would satisfy the thresholdshowing for a truly persuasive demonstration of actualinnocence,” 565 F. 3d 810, 827 (CA11 2009) (Barkett, J., dissenting) (internal quotation marks omitted). The sub-stantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an eviden-tiary hearing..."
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IN RE TROY ANTHONY DAVIS. ON PETITION FOR WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS (No. 08–1443. Decided August 17, 2009). JUSTICE SCALIA, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS joins,dissenting:
"Today this Court takes the extraordinary step—one nottaken in nearly 50 years—of instructing a district court toadjudicate a state prisoner’s petition for an original writ of habeas corpus..."
AND:
"This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted de-fendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that ques-tion unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt thatany claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitu-tionally cognizable. See Herrera v. Collins, 506 U. S. 390, 400–401, 416–417 (1993); see also House v. Bell, 547 U. S. 518, 555 (2006); District Attorney’s Office for Third Judi-cial Dist. v. Osborne, ante, at 18..."
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Scotusblog. Innocence Claim Rejected. Lyle Denniston | Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 1:54 pm
"Carrying out a direct order of the Supreme Court, a federal judge in Georgia made a lengthy new study of a 21-year-old murder case but then ruled Tuesday that a Savannah, Ga., man had not proved that he is innocent of killing a police officer in a fast-food restaurant parking lot. In a 172-page opinion (issued in two parts, found here and here), U.S. District Judge William T. Moore, Jr., ruled that it would be unconstitutional to execute an innocent person, but went on to rule that Troy Anthony Davis “is not innocent...” [emphasis added]
