LAURA MOYE: On the evening of August 18th, 1989 in Savannah, Georgia, a man named Sylvester Coles was picking a fight with a homeless man who just went into a convenience store and bought a pack of beer. He was trying to get the man to give him a can of beer. He refused to, and he followed the man across the parking lot, continuing to argue him and try to bully him into doing this. They went across the street to a Burger King, which was connected to a Greyhound bus station, and the fight escalated.
There were some kids playing pool in a pool hall, including a young man named Troy Davis and some others, who went outside to see what the commotion was, and they went over to check out what was going on. The homeless man was beat in the head with a pistol so badly that he lost consciousness, and his skull was cracked, and he was profusely bleeding in the head.
Hearing this commotion, a young white police officer who was serving off-duty at the Greyhound station attached to the Burger King, ran to check out what was going on, ran to the scene. And before he could even reach for the gun and pull it out of his holster, he was shot to the ground and then shot in the face dead.
So the question became, who shot Officer Mark Allen MacPhail, this young police officer whose death left a woman to be a widow and a young baby to be a son without a father? But perhaps the question that was raised wasn’t that one; perhaps the question that really was on the minds of a group of very enraged police officers and an enraged community was, who will pay for the death of Mark Allen MacPhail? And having no leads, the police were quite desperate.
And one of the first things—you need me to speak up? One of the first things that happened that night is that the other person who was at the scene of the crime, the principal chief alternative suspect, Sylvester Coles, went to the police barracks with a high-paid lawyer and said, “I was there, and I saw Troy Davis commit that crime. I saw him shoot police officer Mark Allen MacPhail dead.”
And it looks pretty clear that what the police then did was take that theory and start to build a case around it, without even investigating the idea that this man himself was the person who could have committed this crime....
...A set of witnesses were rounded up and questioned, including a young man who was sixteen years old, who was—fifteen to twenty police officers came to his house and interrogated him and asked him to sign a statement. Several other people, also vulnerable, were also asked to sign statements, including a man who was illiterate who couldn’t even read the statement he signed. A woman named Dorothy Ferrell, who was out on parole, pregnant and had four children, who basically was sort of asked to do a favor to the prosecutor. So, one by one, this group of witnesses was asked to sign these statements.
The homeless man who was beaten unconscious and couldn’t even remember who beat him and who shot the officer, was bleeding profusely, demanding medical attention. He was interrogated and asked to sign a statement, and they wouldn’t give him help until he did. So, no murder weapon, but a string of these witnesses.
Two years after the crime, Troy Davis goes to death row. The front page of the Savannah Morning News labeled Troy Davis a cop killer before the trial even got underway.
