Troy Davis executed as final appeal fails

A last-minute plea for the death sentence to be commuted was dismissed by the US supreme court at 10.15pm, and Davis was administered with a lethal injection. He was pronounced dead at 11.08pm local time (03.08 GMT).

Davis had been convicted of the murder of off-duty policeman Mark MacPhail in 1989 though he had long claimed he was innocent of the killing. An intense international campaign had grown around the case with supporters such as Pope Benedict and former US president Jimmy Carter all speaking out against the death sentence.

Troy Davis maintained his innocence to the end. Among his final words was an address to the family of the murdered man. He said: “I want to talk to the MacPhail family,”

“I was not responsible for what happened that night. I did not have a gun. I was not the one who took the life of your father, son, brother.”

He then said to the medical personnel who were about to carry out the sentence: “May God have mercy on your souls.”

This was the fourth and final time that Davis had 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.

His laywer Thomas Ruffin described the night’s events as “a legal lynching”.

The polemical film-maker Michael Moore responded to the execution by urging “all Americans with a conscience” to boycott the state of Georgia. In a statement on his website he said:

“I encourage everyone I know to never travel to Georgia, never buy anything made in Georgia, to never do business in Georgia. I will ask my publisher to pull my book from every Georgia bookstore and if they won’t do that I will donate every dime of every royalty my book makes in Georgia to help defeat the racists and killers who run that state.”