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.

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