Claude Jones always claimed that he wasn’t the man who walked into an East Texas liquor store in 1989 and shot the owner. He professed his innocence right up until the moment he was strapped to a gurney in the Texas execution chamber and put to death on December 7, 2000. His murder conviction was based on a single piece of forensic evidence recovered from the crime scene—a strand of hair—that prosecutors claimed belonged to Jones.From the Innocence Project press release:
But DNA tests completed this week at the request of the Observer and the New York-based Innocence Project show the hair didn’t belong to Jones after all.
[Texas governor at the time] George Bush, who was awaiting a decision from the Florida Supreme Court on whether the presidential election recount would continue, denied Jones’ request for a 30 day stay of execution to do DNA test on the hair sample. The memo from the General Counsel’s office that recommended against the stay did not tell Bush that Jones was seeking a DNA test of the hair. Evidence that the hair “matched” Jones was critical to the prosecution’s case at trial and proved to be the key factor in a narrow 3-2 decision by the Texas Court of Appeals finding there was sufficient corroboration of the accomplice who testified against Jones to uphold the murder conviction.San Jacinto County district attorney Bill Burnett was an assistant prosecutor on Claude Jones's case and later, as DA, attempted to have the hair strand evidence destroyed rather than allow testing. Under Texas law, he said, the only person who could request a DNA test was the imprisoned inmate. In this case, the inmate was already dead.
“I have no doubt that if President Bush had known about the request to do a DNA test of the hair he would have would have issued a 30-day stay in this case and Jones would not have been executed,” said Barry C. Scheck, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law.
Documents show that attorneys in the governor’s office failed to inform Bush that DNA evidence might exonerate Jones. Bush, a proponent of DNA testing in death penalty cases, had previously halted another execution so that key DNA evidence could be examined. Without knowing that Jones wanted DNA testing, Bush let the execution go forward.posted by nomadicink at 1:51 PM on November 12, 2010 [12 favorites]
"Eight men charged. Five confessions. But only one DNA match. Why would four innocent men confess to a brutal crime they didn't commit?posted by ericb at 2:36 PM on November 12, 2010 [5 favorites]
In The Confessions, FRONTLINE producer Ofra Bikel (Innocence Lost, An Ordinary Crime) investigates the conviction of four men -- current and former sailors in the U.S. Navy -- for the rape and murder of a Norfolk, Va., woman in 1997. In the first television interviews with the 'Norfolk Four' since their release, Bikel learns of some of the high-pressure police interrogation techniques -- the threat of the death penalty, sleep deprivation, intimidation -- that led each of the men to confess, despite the lack of any evidence linking them to the crime."
Death Penalty: The Innocence List -- "Average number of years between being sentenced to death and exoneration: 9.8 years. Number of cases in which DNA played a substantial factor in establishing innocence: 17."posted by ericb at 2:41 PM on November 12, 2010 [2 favorites]
From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years, I have endeavored - indeed, I have struggled - along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. 1 Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.Justice Harry Blackmun
The basic question - does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants "deserve" to die? - cannot be answered in the affirmative. It is not simply that this Court has allowed vague aggravating circumstances to be employed... The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.
Careful. We don't know that he didn't do it.
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posted by Sidhedevil at 1:36 PM on November 12, 2010