One such occasion was the review of the case of Troy Anthony Davis, an African-American convicted in 1991 of murdering police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia.
The Supreme Court of the United States convened a hearing on the issue of a stay, deciding in favor, just two hours before the planned execution.
On October 24, 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a stay of execution, pending a decision on Davis's federal habeas corpus petition.
The court described defense efforts to upset the conviction as "largely smoke and mirrors" [3] and found that several of the proffered affidavits were not recantations at all.
Nearly one million people signed petitions urging the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant clemency.
[6] After a last-minute appeal to the United States Supreme Court was denied, the sentence was carried out through lethal injection on September 21, 2011.
[8] This private probation legislation would have "effectively transferred supervision of approximately 25,000 misdemeanors from the State Department of Corrections to the individual counties."