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Last year, Sara Totonchi [profile] of the Southern Center for Human Rights warned [JURIST comment] that the questions and doubts surrounding Davis' case would make his execution a travesty of justice. Her writing came a few weeks after the US District Court for the Southern District of Georgia [official website] denied [JURIST report] Davis' habeas corpus petition even though the presiding judge noted numerous problems with the evidence presented by the State of Georgia in securing Davis' conviction. The Supreme Court had instructed the district court to examine new findings of fact in the case after taking the rare step of granting [JURIST report] Davis' original writ of habeas corpus [cert. petition, PDF], despite Davis' exhaustion of his appeals under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act [text]. A few weeks after the court had declined to grant certiorari [JURIST report] in 2008, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit [official website] granted a provisional stay of execution [JURIST report], directing the parties to address through briefs whether Davis could meet the stringent requirements of federal law that would permit him to file a second habeas corpus petition for federal review of his case. In 2006, the American Bar Association [association website] recommended a moratorium on the death penalty in Georgia and in Alabama [JURIST reports] after an ABA panel study identified numerous flaws in the states' criminal justice systems that it claimed greatly compromised the fair administration of capital punishment. More recently a federal judge ruled [JURIST report] in June that Florida's death penalty procedures are unconstitutional, a holding Richard Dieter [profile] of the Death Penalty Information Center says highlights the arbitrariness of the death penalty [JURIST comment] and the problems with a state exacting an irreversible punishment. Additionally, in March of this year IllinoisGovernor Pat Quinn [official website] signed into law a bill that abolished the death penalty [JURIST report] in that state.
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