Death row inmate’s late plea dismissed

Davis was convicted of the 1989 killing of police officer Mark MacPhail near a Burger King restaurant in the city of Savannah, Georgia.

This will be the fourth and – failing the intervention of one of the courts – final time that Davis has been scheduled to die.

In 2007, his execution was called off one day before he was due to die. The following year, the US supreme court intervened just two and a half hours before Davis was due in the execution chamber. And again in 2008, the federal court of appeals stopped the execution three days before he was to die.

The family of murdered MacPhail, convinced of Davis’s guilt, have long supported his execution.

His case has become a focus for death penalty opponents because seven of nine trial witnesses have recanted their testimony against him, and two further witnesses have come forward to say that another man, Sylvester Coles, confessed to the crime.

Davis’s lawyers maintain he is a victim of mistaken identity and a terrible miscarriage of justice, but prosecutors say they have no doubt that the right person was convicted.

“The Board has considered the totality of the information presented in this case and thoroughly deliberated on it, after which the decision was to deny clemency,” the state body said in a statement.

He is due to die by lethal injection at 7pm local time (midnight GMT) on Wednesday at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Georgia.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu and Helen Prejean, who wrote Dead Man Walking, a book about a death row inmate, are among those who have issued statements on behalf of Davis. Around 2,000 people, including civil rights leaders, rallied on his behalf last Friday.

Davis’s supporters held a mass vigil on Tuesday evening on the steps of the Georgia capitol.

Hundreds of people gathered at the statehouse in Atlanta, trying to urge the state to spare his life.