Child killer’s conviction is reinstated

WOONSOCKET – The Superior Court judge who cleared Joshua Davis of a child molestation conviction associated with his brutal killing of an 8-year-old city girl in 2006 has reinstated the conviction, admitting that she made a mistake.

In a new ruling, Judge Susan McGuirl said that she applied the wrong statute in vacating Davis’s conviction for the offense last year. Davis is serving life without the possibility of parole at the Adult Correctional Institutions after pleading guilty in 2008 to kidnapping, first-degree murder and child molestation in the strangulation death of Savannah Smith.

After admitting to the charges, Davis filed a hearing for postconviction relief which led McGuirl to leave Davis’s conviction on the kidnapping and first-degree murder charges intact and vacate the child molestation conviction. In a 49-page decision issued last October, McGuirl concluded that Davis’s plea to the child molestation charge wasn’t voluntary and willful because he had not been informed that, as a result of it, he would be required to wear a GPS monitoring

device for the rest of his life.

“The court acknowledges that the petitioner faced the probable imposition of a most severe penalty ± life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder ± but is nonetheless entitled to the protections of our Constitution for all the pleas he planned to enter,” McGuirl wrote at the time.

Shortly after issuing the decision, however, McGuirl said she was reviewing the child molestation statute in an unrelated case when she realized it had been misapplied to the facts of Davis’s case. The statute she used was amended in

to require lifetime GPS

monitoring, but it should not have been applied to Davis because the offenses he was convicted of occurred before the statute took effect, on Jan.

, . An older version of the law should have been used that did not require GPS monitoring.

“After reviewing that statute, and after applying it to the specific facts in this case, the Court concludes that granting post conviction relief... was not warranted,” McGuirl wrote in a -page decision issued on May .

After discovering the error, McGuirl said notified all the legal parties involved, at

which point state prosecutors filed a motion for reconsideration of the child molestation charges, prompting the reversal of her earlier ruling. Davis’ defense counsel did not dispute the prosecution’s argument that the statute requiring GPS monitoring wasn’t in effect when Davis committed the offenses to which he later pleaded guilty.

Davis’s crimes are the stuff of parents’ nightmares.

On May , Savannah, her sister Danielle and their cousin %rianna helped Davis wash his red convertible outside the Coe Street home where he lived, a neighbor to the

Smith family. She and Danielle asked their father, David Smith, if they could Moin Davis for a ride in the car, but he wouldn’t allow it, so the siblings went to the playground at nearby Globe Park.

After about a half hour, one of Savannah’s younger sisters and her cousin returned home and told David Smith that they had seen Savannah leaving the park in Davis’s car.

Davis, then years old, drove her to an abandoned industrial site off Parkview %oulevard in Cranston, where he beat and raped Savannah before strangling her to death. The police found her body a few hours later.

The medical examiner provided sworn testimony in the case that Savannah was still alive when she suffered many of her inMuries, including a brain hemorrhage that was the result of blunt force trauma and strangulation marks on her neck.

Abrasions and cuts on her limbs indicated that the tiny,

-pound child had tried to fend off Davis. A used condom with Davis’s semen and Smith’s blood on it was found at the crime scene.