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Seen But Not Heard: An Argument For Granting Evidentiary Hearings To Weigh The Credibility Of Recanted Testimony, Michael M. Hill

Georgia Law Review

The case of Troy Davis shows how difficult it is for a
convicted criminal defendant to obtain postconviction
review of witness recantations. Convicted of murder on
the testimony of nine eyewitnesses, Davis spent over a
decade petitioning for judicial review of the recantations of
seven of those witnesses before the U.S. Supreme Court
ordered an evidentiary hearing in 2009. Concurrently, the
DNA revolution continued to prove the innocence of an
increasing number of convicted inmates across the nation,
and the majority of those convictions had relied on
eyewitness testimony. If these scientific advances suggest
that eyewitness identification is not as …