Voir Dire, Part 6: Witness Tampering Killed My Friend’s Bro

(L) Martina Correia with Dublin nuns (C) the back of the famous tee-shirt (R) Troy Davis (1968-2011)

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

Everybody knows that the late Troy Anthony Davis was innocent. Here are two ways you could know it. First, a worldwide group of justice warriors took up his case and gathered two-thirds of a million signatures, requesting clemency.  Among the requesters were Bishop Tutu, former president Jimmy Carter, and 3,000 clergypersons.

Clemency only means reduce his sentence form death to life imprisonment. There was no reason, no reason at all, for the 3 members of Georgia’s Pardon Bord to vote against the request. So that is Red Flag #1.

The other Red Flag is the fact that another man was suspected of having been the person who actually committed the crime.  Even his cousin blames him. But the police, to this day, never charged that man or investigated him in any way. So it is obvious they did not want to solve the crime (the fatal shooting of security guard Mark McPhail).

The subject of this article is witness tampering. Because the police wanted to blame Troy, they set up 9 people to give false testimony at his trial. Later, but before Troy was executed, seven of the nine recanted their testimony. An eighth was deceased (I think, not sure) and the ninth was the man I mentioned who likely “did it.”

Troy’s family was elated that each of the 7 said they had lied, due to police pressure. Note that those seven took a big chance recanting.  It meant they had originally committed perjury and could face punishment for that. I’ll now quote from their recantations:

Recantations by Six ‘Eyewitnesses’ Whose Original 1991 Testimony Had Been Used To Convict Troy Davis

Antoine Williams: They asked me to describe the shooter and what he looked like and what he was wearing. I kept telling them that I didn’t know. It was dark, my windows were tinted, and I was scared. …. After the officers talked to me, they gave me a statement and told me to sign it. I signed it. I did not read it because I cannot read.

Kevin McQueen: The truth is that Troy never confessed to me… I made up the confession from information I had heard on TV.

JeffreySapp: I got tired of them harassing me, and they made it clear that the only way they would leave me alone is if I told them what they wanted to hear. I told them that Troy told me he did it, but it wasn’t true. ….I didn’t want to have any more problems with the cops, so I testified against Troy.

Darrell Collins: After a couple of hours of the detectives yelling at me and threatening me, I finally broke down and told them what they wanted to hear. They would tell me things that they said had happened and I would repeat whatever they said. … the police had me so messed up that I felt that’s all I could do or else I would go to jail.

Dorothy Ferrell: From the way the officer was talking, he gave me the impression that I should say that Troy Davis was the one who shot the officer like the other witness had …. I also felt like I had to cooperate with the officer because of my being on parole…. The truth was that I didn’t see who shot [MacPhail].

Larry Young: I couldn’t honestly remember what anyone looked like or what different people were wearing. Plus, I had been drinking that day, so I just couldn’t tell who did what. The cops didn’t want to hear that and kept pressing me to give them answers. They made it clear that we weren’t leaving until I told them what they wanted to hear ….

So what happened after that? Troy filed a habeas corpus claim with the US Supreme Court. That court in turn asked the Georgia Judge Moore to take another look at the recantations.

I can only assume that the Georgia judge was under instructions to murder Troy, so to speak. He found all seven statements to be unusable.  It is a great embarrassment to read what he said.

— Moore refers to “live, credible testimony” from police and prosecutor, as though it were of the same type as disinterested testimony. This is unheard of.

— Moore never says that, in the document he is reviewing, some recanters mention being “threatened with guns.”  Amazing.

— He misrepresents the defense’s effort to subpoena Sylvester Coles, and fails to say that some identify Coles as the killer. OMG.

— Finding no other way to make the police coercion go away he discredits it: “Police would have coerced better than that.”[!!!] – Please re-read that sentence.

So what’s the law here? We can easily see that various police persons tampered with the witnesses originally. Witness tampering consists either of bribing someone to give false testimony or pressuring someone to NOT be a witness, or to tune down, or alter, his testimony.  In Georgia we see that the legislation provides:

GA Code sec 16-10-(2020)

a. A person who, with intent to deter a witness from testifying freely, fully, and truthfully to any matter pending in any court,… communicates, directly or indirectly, to such witness any threat of injury or damage to the person, property, or employment of the witness … or who offers or delivers any benefit, reward, or consideration to such witness or to a relative or associate of the witness shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years.

Troy Davis’s feisty sister Martina died 6 weeks after his execution, but the younger sister Kimberly Davis has survived and intends to get justice for her brother.  I think Judge Moore is to blame for not reversing the decision about the witnesses, but I also think each of the police needs to be investigated for their alleged witness-tampering. Why ever not?

Really, I think it is the US Supreme Court’s fault, as I always wish to blame the top person the most.  Indeed, I suspect that a decision about Troy was made at a level higher than SCOTUS. Recall again the low-level Pardon Board three persons who forbade clemency.  One of those three, Gale Buckner, later became a chief magistrate.  Who influenced her, and why.

Now let’s talk about Australian law, with an eye to the Operation Noetic fandangle. Per the Commonwealth CRIMES ACT 1914 – SECT 36A

Intimidation of witnesses etc.

             (1)  A person (the first person ) commits an offence if: (a)  the first person:

                              (i)  threatens, intimidates or restrains another person; or

                             (ii)  uses violence to, or inflicts an injury on, another person; or

                            (iii)  causes or procures violence, damage, loss or disadvantage to another person; or

                            (iv)  causes or procures the punishment of another person; and

                     (b)  the first person does so on account of the other person having appeared, or being about to appear, as a witness in a judicial proceeding; and

                     (c)  the judicial proceeding is a federal judicial proceeding.

Penalty:  Imprisonment for 5 years.

I am not aware of any hanky-panky regarding witnesses in the current case (the Noetic arrestees other than O’Dea and Pridgeon), who are being tried by a jury this week. In fact I am not sure of anything that is happening in that case as there seem to be a surfeit of suppression orders.

The trial has something to do with relatives of abused kids “stealing” the kid and thus breaching custody orders. Perhaps government witnesses, such as members of Child Protection agencies, are the likely targets of pressure. Why do they claim that a kid is NOT suffering abuse, when it’s plain as the nose on your face that the kid IS suffering? Has someone either bribed or coerced them?

As I previoulsy reported of a US case, a young judge in the Iowa district court, Adam Sauer, refused to accept the testimony of a CPS social worker, Ms Chelsea Gray, age 30, in regard to the (unnecessary) placing of four siblings in foster care.

An agent for the Division of Criminal Investigation, Scott Reger, signed the affidavit outlining how Ms Gray had given false testimony under oath. Per newsobserver.com, Reger lists three counts of perjury:

— She testified at a hearing that she had spoken with their teachers about academic and social concerns the kids were exhibiting at school. Later she admitted that she had not spoken to teachers.

— She testified that she went to the foster home to check on the children once a month, as required by law, but later admitted she did not visit them.

— She testified that she would recommend a foster care placement keeping all four children in the same home, but it was found that she had in mind to separate one of the children from the other three.

Maybe that excellent judge could have gone further to find out why Ms Gray lied.

In his book “Everybody Knows,” Dr Russell Pridgeon is concerned about false evidence about his passport that was stated by police and false evidence about his finances. But in every chapter of the book, Pridgeon throws a fit over what is NOT being said. Namely the officials never exercise their larynx to discuss the children’s fate. It is a total nonissue in the Noetic Operation.

It is almost incredible that the much-abused kids have not been seen by their good mums at least since the 2018 swoop down.  I now propose that — although it does not appear in black-letter law — the whole unreality of this behavior may tamper every witness. People are dissuaded from saying anything contrary to this big unreal scenario.

Do you know what I mean?

In the title, I said that witness-tampering killed my friend’s bro.  Martina was my friend. The bro was Troy and, as everyone can see, if those 7 witnesses had not pinned the murder on Troy there was no cause to arrest him.

I propose a major expansion of the concept of “pressuring” in criminal cases.  Who is pressuring whom, and why?  And if there is a statute that makes the pressuring criminal, how about sending some high mucky-mucks — or low ducky-ducks — to jail.

If it’s a crime, call the police!