 Texas Execution Chamber
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Henry Watkins “Hank” Skinner was supposed to be executed tomorrow, but last Tuesday a Gray County, Texas, District Court judge pushed the date back one month, to March 24. Skinner has been on Death Row in Texas since 1993, awaiting execution for the murder of his girlfriend and her two sons. He has maintained his innocence since his arrest, and investigators from the Northwestern University Journalism School’s Medill Innocence Project have shot numerous holes in the prosecution’s case. But Texas officials refuse to conduct a simple DNA test that could point to the condemned man’s innocence or cement his guilt.
Skinner’s scheduled lethal injection comes shortly after Texas Gov. Rick Perry has removed sympathetic panelists from the state forensic committee’s investigation into the case of Cameron Todd Willingham and replaced them with panelists critics say are stymieing the investigation. Willingham was executed in 2003 for murdering his three daughters by setting fire to his house. Nine arson experts and an investigation published in the New Yorker last year have since made a strong case that Willingham was innocent of the crime.
Prosecutors do not like to be proven wrong.
Thanks Cináedh.
Democrats are not innocent.
Who was the last innocent man they executed?
Ah, the American legal system. Far more concerned with procedure than with getting at the truth.
Note that I did not refer to it as the American “justice” system. That would be an oxymoron.
“But Texas officials refuse to conduct a simple DNA test”
Maybe we should allow Texas to secede from the USA, as their dumbs–t governor wants to do.
——–
to #1 Mr/Mrs/Ms Personality
If you were being sarcastic, then you should realize that sarcasm doesn’t translate well to text only web methods.
If you are a troll, then just go away. this site has plenty already.
If you are serious, then just drop dead.
#2 Tim said “Who was the last innocent man they executed?”
Statistically, balancing Type I and Type II errors, probably 4/100 are innocent. That’s just standard population error rates.
If we as a nation execute even one innocent man then we are all guilty of murder by way of the laws we hold. Until we can prove with 100% certainty that no one will be executed who is an innocent man or woman, we cannot allow ourselves to take another life. It’s too important.
idiots mind you this is the state that gave us dead brain George bush.
remember send him cash for his Haiti fund and by no means send blankets.
watch out for the shysters.
Followup – did a little digging.
People who support capital punishment and are involved in the judicial system claim .5% (1/200) wrongful conviction rate.
Those opposed claim that it’s closer to 10% based on various factors (successful overturn rates based on DNA evidence, reliability of eyewitness accounts, lousy evidence and lab handling, false confessions, snitches, etc).
So a 4% wrongful conviction rate isn’t out of line.
Even if he is innocent, why would prosecutors set a precedent where their cases are questioned in the future? Sure, this guy may be innocent, but the integrity of decisions once made is far more important.
This is one of the problems with having lengthy appeals process on death row. Other countries execute condemned prisoners within minutes of the conviction – no chance of being proven “innocent” at some future date. The judgment was given with the best possible knowledge available on that day.
Some countries don’t even bother with a trial. Just makes things messy when people can defend themselves. {end sarcasm}
Ok, first of all, don’t you dare let Texas secede. I live there and would not if circumstances were different. Second, why won’t they accept DNA evidence? There must be some reason behind this. But then again, I do live in a state with very backwards reasoning (and lack of.) I oppose the death penalty for the simple fact that there are very rare circumstances where we are absolutely certain of a person’s guilt. It’s bad enough that some individuals are wrongfully incarcerated for decades, but to kill them would be inexcusable.
#9 If that’s satire, bravo.
If you’re serious… may you end up framed for murder in Texas and executed unjustly. Karma and all that. 🙂
So if the guy says he didn’t do it, that’s good enough for you? Medill’s innocence project has a decent track record, so will have to see just how strong these holes are.
I love how not accepting DNA evidence is supposed to be proof of innocence, but there have been cases where eventually the prosecutors and the state gave in and conducted the tests, and what do you now, the guy did do it!
#13 If he did do it that’s fine, but why shouldn’t we spend a few hundred dollars to find out? Death row people are kept for years at great expense; it doesn’t seem excessive to do the test.
To me refusing to do a DNA test seems like another manifestation of a common mindset that is evidence-averse. I don’t see why a decision itself should be more sacrosanct than the process used to derive the decision.
Of course if you accept DNA then you implicitly accept evolution. Maybe that’s the issue.
Whatever happened to “better to let 100 guilty people walk free than convict 1 innocent person”.
My reply to #13 is: If the DNA says the guy did it, then fry him.
But what if it says it was not him? What if it was YOU!
#9 “The judgment was given with the best possible knowledge available on that day.”
WHAT IF IT WAS WRONG!
WHAT IF IT WAS YOU! I can imagine your reaction to that situation. Tell me you’d go quietly, #9!
I just can’t believe some of you self righteous jerks! Didn’t you ever go to school, or did you sleep through it all? You are the same ones who chant USA USA, while you have no idea of what the true ideals of our country are.
They aren’t executing him, they are just terminating his right to free meals, free room and board and free health care in the prison system.
The guy killed his girlfriend and her 2 children and was convicted by a jury and admits being in the house at the time of the murder and doped up on drugs.
Yeah, maybe a 1 in 10,000 odds he didn’t do it and was somehow framed but hey, people get hit by cars too.
The anti-death-penalty freaks always trump up the “innocence angle” for every death row inmate far beyond the reality of the circumstances.
So you have to consider those articles as propoganda as there is no effort made to present a balanced story, just an effort for 20 year old junior law students to get attention.
We Texans will tell you that it is not a matter of truth, but a matter of procedure. We checked off all the boxes needed to kill this guy, so all you east-coast liberal smarmy meddlers and your highfalutin “justice” this and “justice” that can go suck a pig.
#18 Not hard to see why most of the country looks at y’all with humor or horror.
15 Grim “Whatever happened to “better to let 100 guilty people walk free than convict 1 innocent person”.
It turned into “Better to execute 100 guilty people than let one escapee kill 1 innocent person.”
Partial list of Murders That Could Have Been Averted By Capital Punishment:
Charles Fitzgerald killed a deputy sheriff and was released after serving just 11 years, and in 1926 murdered a California policeman.
• In 1931, “Gypsy” Bob Harper, who had been convicted of murder, escaped from a Michigan prison and killed two persons. After being recaptured, he then killed the prison warden and his deputy.
• In 1936, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported the case of a Florida prisoner who committed two murders, received clemency for each, and then murdered twice more. On March 17, 1971 Hoover told a congressional subcommittee that 19 of the killers responsible for the murder of policemen during the 1960s had been previously convicted of murder.
• In 1952, Allen Pruitt was arrested for the knife slaying of a newsstand. In 1965, he was charged with fatally stabbing a prison doctor and an assistant prison superintendent
• In 1957, Richard Biegenwald murdered a store owner during a robbery in New Jersey. He was convicted and later paroled. After which he shot and killed an 18-year-old Asbury Park, New Jersey girl. He also killed three other 17-year-old New Jersey girls and a 34-year-old man.
• A man convicted of murder in Oklahoma pleaded with the judge and jury to impose the death sentence, but was given life instead. He later killed a fellow inmate.
• In 1972, Arthur James Julius was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. In 1978, he was given a brief leave from prison, during which he raped and murdered a cousin.
• In 1976, Jimmy Lee Gray (who was free on parole from an Arizona conviction for killing a 16-year-old high school girl) kidnapped, sodomized, and suffocated a three-year-old Mississippi girl.
• Also in 1976, Timothy Charles Palmes was on probation for an earlier manslaughter conviction when he and two accomplices robbed and brutally murdered a Florida furniture store owner.
• In 1978, Wayne Robert Felde, while being taken to jail in handcuffs, pulled a gun hidden in his pants and killed a policeman. At the time, he was a fugitive from a work release program in Maryland, where he had been convicted of manslaughter.
• In 1979, Donald Dillbeck was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for murdering a Florida sheriffs deputy. In 1983, He escaped and stabbed a woman to death at a Tallahassee shopping mall.
• In 1981, author Norman Mailer and many other New York literati embraced convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott (who had murdered a fellow prison inmate) and succeeded in having him released early from a Utah prison. Abbott later stabbed actor Richard Adan to death in New York.
1982. Viva Leroy Nash spent 25 years in prison for shooting a Connecticut police officer in 1947, and was sentenced to life in prison for shooting a man to death in Salt Lake City in 1977. But he escaped from a prison work crew in October 1982 and fatally shot a Phoenix coin shop sales clerk a month later.
• On October 22, 1983 at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, two prison guards were murdered in two separate instances by inmates who were both serving life terms for previously murdering inmates.
• On December 7, 1984 Benny Lee Chaffin kidnapped, raped, and murdered a 9-year-old Springfield, Oregon girl. He had been convicted of murder once before in Texas, but not executed
• Thomas Eugene Creech, who had been convicted of three murders and had claimed a role in more than 40 killings in 13 states as a paid killer for a motorcycle gang, killed a fellow prison inmate in 1981.
Kenneth Allen McDuff 1998 — freed from death row and then returned after killing again.
Autopsy Set for Priest Killed in Prison. Joseph L. Druce, 37, who received a life sentence in 1989 for murder, armed robbery and other counts, was placed in isolation and will face murder charges in priest’s death.
2007. Daniel Tavares Jr. served 16 years in a Massachusetts prison for killing his mother with a carving knife. Tavares now faces two counts of aggravated murder in the killing of a newlywed couple in Washington state after his release.
Conservatives often whine and complain about the state taxing you to death and interfering with your life, but state executions are no problem. Seems a tad incongruous to me.
Conservatives and liberals love to call each other names!
It’s more important than facts, damn it!
Monkey #1; “Me conservative monkey think you am dumb because you am liberal”
Monkey #2: “Me liberal monkey think you am dumb because you am conservative”
And you wonder why politicians think voters are suckers. It is because most of you can be distracted so easily.
it’s simple. The only good texan is a dead texan.
By killing an innocent person, the state becomes the murderer.
#22 The anti-death-penalty freaks always trump up the “innocence angle” for every death row inmate far beyond the reality of the circumstances.
So you have to consider those articles as propoganda as there is no effort made to present a balanced story, just an effort for 20 year old junior law students to get attention.
From wikipedia’s “Innocence Project” article: As of January 21, 2010, 249 defendants previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing. Almost all of these convictions involved some form of sexual assault and approximately 25% involved murder.
From me: How can you possibly be against this? Life and liberty are supposed to matter. Although spending millions of dollars to try, incarcerate, and execute a criminal is okay it’s overly restrictive to analyze evidence using the accepted standard test? If they do kill the guy without doing the test it will signal to everybody that the state was unsure that they had the right guy. How that helps the reputation of capital punishment is beyond me.
Makes sense they kill the innocent. I think their goal is to be the crazy state.
Civilized societies don’t kill people in cold blood — even really bad people.
Why would a DNA test let 100 guilty go free?
Thats just a stupid comment and a silly example.
The justice system is supposed to punish you for what you have done, not for what you might do, or what you didn’t do.
>> RBG said, on February 23rd, 2010 at 4:28 pm
>> 15 Grim “Whatever happened to “better to let 100 guilty people walk free than convict 1 innocent person”.
>> Partial list of Murders That Could Have Been Averted By Capital Punishment:
Keeping them in jail would have prevented most of these murders — and allowed America to credibly claim they are a civilized country.
As for the murders done in jail, proper security procedures would help stop that. (Even capital punishment cases spend time in jail.)
>> Hmeyers said, on February 23rd, 2010 at 4:57 pm
>> Conservatives and liberals love to call each other names!
>> It’s more important than facts, damn it!
Fair enough.
But what facts are relevant here?
For the most part, this debate comes down to a moral debate.
I have seen “facts” showing the capital punishment has no deterrent value. But most pro-capital punishment people don’t argue based on that — for them it’s a justice issue. I don’t think true justice can ever be done in murder cases but that life in prison is the best we can do and may actually be worse punishment than death. I don’t know any facts that prove me right or wrong.
I’m also a Christian and, as I read my New Testament, I believe that capital punishment is a sin. Clearly, other Christian read the Old Testament and come to a very different conclusion. But this is faith, not facts.
Ultimately, I see capital punishment as an offense to civilized society. Obviously, others don’t agree with me. Neither of us have many facts to back up our position.