Carlton Gary, a Georgia death-row prisoner scheduled for execution on March 15, is asking the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant him clemency on the basis of new and withheld evidence that undercuts the prosecution testimony against him and suggests he did not commit the crimes for which he was sentenced to death. Gary was convicted of raping and killing three women in the 1970s, in what prosecutors have claimed was part of a string of nine burglaries and rapes committed by a single perpetrator. Gary’s lawyers argue that new evidence that was either unavailable or undisclosed at the time of his trial raises enough doubt about his guilt that he should not be executed. In his clemency petition, his lawyers write: “We are not talking about questionable recanting witnesses who came forward long after trial, but hard physical evidence of innocence.” Bodily fluid testing performed on semen from two of the crime scenes likely excludes Gary, but conclusive DNA testing couldn’t be performed because the samples were contaminated while in the possession of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab. In some of the most damning evidence prosecutors presented at trial, the survivor of one of the attacks identified Gary as her assailant. However, DNA testing later performed on evidence from her attack excluded Gary as the perpetrator and police withheld an initial report from that rape victim in which she told officers that she had been asleep and her bedroom had been dark at the time of the attack, and she could not identify or describe her attacker. Shoeprint evidence from the scene was also withheld from Gary’s defense team until 20 years after his trial. The size 10 print found at one of the crime scenes could not have been left by Gary, who wears size 13½ shoes. Prosecutors also claimed that Gary had confessed to participating in the crimes, but not to raping or murdering the victims. However, police neither recorded nor contemporaneously documented his alleged statement, which his lawyers say “fits all the recognized hallmarks of a false confession that never happened.”
(Kate Brumback, Citing new evidence, condemned Georgia inmate seeks mercy, Associated Press, March 8, 2018.) See Clemency and Innocence.
