On this much, the police and Girvies Davis can agree. On Dec. 22, 1978, Charles Biebel, an 89-year-old retired farmer, was found slumped in his wheelchair in a mobile home in Belleville, Illinois, his chest shredded by two bullet wounds. The following August, Davis, a 20-year-old alcoholic with a childhood history of brain damage and suicide attempts, and an arrest record dating back to age 8, was picked up for the armed robbery of an auto-parts store in East St. Louis. Ten days later, Davis confessed to 11 crimes, among them the Biebel murder.
The validity of his confession, however, is heatedly disputed -- no small matter since police have no witnesses, no weapon, not even a fingerprint, to further link Davis to the Biebel case. The police insist that Davis offered his confession without prompting; Davis counters that it was coerced under threat of death. Now, a coalition of Illinois activists-among them a former Chicago police chief, a retired judge, author Studs Terkel and several prosecutors-is scrambling to rescue Davis from execution by lethal injection this Wednesday at 12:01 a.m. at the Menard Correctional Center.
The case has also attracted attention from advocates for the mentally disabled, who believe that any unchaperoned confession by a retarded defendant is suspect. As a teen, Davis was diagnosed with "organic brain disfunction," which doctors date to a bicycle accident suffered at age 10; in their judgment, he falls within the "borderline range of intelligence." According to Richard Ofshe, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in interrogation techniques, "Mentally retarded people get through life by being accommodating whenever there is a disagreement. They've learned that they are often wrong; for them, agreeing is a way of surviving." Eliciting a confession from such people, he adds, "is like taking candy from a baby."
To be sure, Davis is no swaddled innocent, as he is the first to admit. "I made my share of errors and mistakes, and did my share of wrong -- sinned against both man and God," he wrote recently. "But I am not a murderer." That message has been disseminated to tens of thousands of Internet users via a home page that was established by his defense team on the World Wide Web. In addition to the facts of the case, the page presents, side by side, two quite dissimilar handwriting samples: one taken from a note that police say Davis wrote in 1979, the other recently penned by Davis. In response, more than 1,000 people have so far sent E-mail to Illinois Governor Jim Edgar demanding clemency for Davis.
According to the police, that 1979 note, which admits to 11 crimes, among them the killing of an "old man in a trailor [sic] . with a 22 rifle," was written by Davis and passed to a guard at the St. Clair County jail on Sept. 9. Police maintain that Davis was then removed from his cell at 10 p.m. for a five-hour tour to help investigators look for evidence. At the tour's end, they say, he signed documents prepared by police in which he confessed to more than 20 separate criminal charges of murder, attempted murder and robbery.