FURTHER UPDATE: Troy Davis executed
on Sep 21, 2011 at 5:50 pm
FURTHER UPDATE 11:15 p.m. Troy Anthony Davis was executed in Georgia shortly after 11 p.m. Tuesday, about an hour after the Supreme Court had refused to block the procedure. The execution was by lethal injection. State officials put the time of death at 11:08 p.m.
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UPDATE 10:20 p.m. Shortly after 10 p.m., the Supreme Court refused to delay the execution in Georgia of Troy Anthony Davis. There were no noted dissents. The Court’s order is here.
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Six months after the Supreme Court previously refused all attempts to stop the execution of Georgia inmate Troy Anthony Davis, his lawyers on Wednesday filed a new plea seeking to head off the state schedule to put him to death Wednesday evening. The brief filing, promising to send in “shortly” a new plea for Supreme Court review of his case, can be found here. The state swiftly replied, arguing against any delay.
Last March 28, in what had appeared to be a thorough rejection of Davis’s bid to put on a new case that he is innocent of murder of an off-duty Atlanta police officer in 1989, the Court turned down without noted dissent  five different pleas by his attorneys.
The two-decades-long struggle to challenge Davis’s murder conviction has made it one of the most highly visible, modern cases on an innocence plea, and has repeatedly been taken to the Supreme Court.  In the Court’s most unusual reaction so far, in August 2009 it ordered a federal judge in Georgia to make a full new review of the innocence claim. That judge wound up deciding that Davis “is not innocent.” That conclusion was left intact by the Justices in their orders last March.
In urging the Justices not to delay execution any further, the state Wednesday evening said that Davis’s lawyers had waited too long to challenge an execution that had been scheduled 15 days ago.
