Troy Davis Pursuasive Paper Outline

Coles made a scapegoat of Troy.

• Coles seen arguing with Larry Young.

• Larry Young told the Georgia Board of Investigations in 2007 that Coles, not Davis, most likely attacked and pistol-whipped him. The record shows that the shooter was the same man arguing with Young.
• Coles was known to have a .38 caliber revolver, same caliber as the casings found at the scene of the shooting of officer MacPhail.

• Coles never considered a suspect.

• Coles came to the police station with a lawyer the day after the shooting and implicated Troy Davis as the shooter. This was unusual in an anti-snitch culture where police was not seen as allies.
• From the beginning of the investigation, the prosecutors decided that Troy was going to be the target of further investigation and excluded all others. They brought Coles to the scene for reenactment as a witness, not a suspect. Which obviously would plant a very strong suggestion that whoever they saw that night, Redd Coles could not have been the bad guy.
• Troy Davis’ photograph had been released by media as the lead suspect. When witnesses were brought in to identify the shooter’s photograph, they has already been painted. On top of that, Coles was not included in the photo lineup, so the witnesses assumed that the shooter was one of the men in the photo lineup, and assumed Coles was not the shooter. This contaminated or overwrote people’s memory.

• Witnesses’ recantations implicate Coles as the shooter.

• 7 of the 9 original eyewitnesses recanted their testimony. That leaves only two witnesses, but one of them could be crucially flawed: Coles, the suspected perpetrator, stuck with his story. The innocence Project has exonerated 239 wrongfully convicted individuals using DNA, and 75% of those occurred due to inaccurate eyewitness testimony.
• Benjamin Gordon testified at the federal evidentiary hearing held in 2010 that he saw Coles shoot MacPhail. Gordon recounted specific details of the shooting that have not been publicized, and police reports put him across the street from the crime scene at the moment of the shooting. Gordon is related to Coles, has known him all his life, has been ostracized by his family for testifying and has said that he kept quiet all these years for fear of Coles retaliating against him. The judge did not find them credible.
• Anthony Hargrove and two others testified at the same hearing that Redd Coles had admitted to killing MacPhail. However, their claims were rejected by Judge William T. Moore as inadmissible hearsay because Coles failed to appear at court for cross-examination despite a subpoena.