DELAY THIS EXECUTION

If you’ve been reading my blogs, you know that I am a strong supporter of and an advocate for the death penalty. I am convinced that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to premeditated murders and killings done during the commission of a robbery, rape, burglary or other type of felony.

Of course, I do not want to see an innocent person executed, something that rarely ever happens. So, when I read an editorial on the pending execution of Henry Skinner in yesterday’s Houston Chronicle, I had to come down on the side of those wanting to delay his execution to allow for DNA testing.

I detest those last minute appeals that are filed for someone who has had numerous prior appeals heard while he’s been on death row for 10, 20 or more years. But in Skinner’s case, this is not the first appeal asking for DNA testing. I fail to understand why the State was so adamant in its refusal to grant that request.

Here is the Chronicle’s editorial:

IT’S BEST TO TEST
DNA could prove a death row convict innocent. Let’s test it while he’s alive

Houston Chonicle
March 20, 2010

Henry Skinner is scheduled to be executed Wednesday for a crime that he says he didn't commit. And DNA evidence, still untested, might show that Texas has the wrong man.

Skinner is no angel. He's always maintained that on New Year's Eve 1993 he passed out, drunk and high on codeine, in the Pampa house where he lived with his girlfriend and her two grown sons. When he woke up, he says, he found their bodies.

Twila Busby had been strangled and bashed in the head with an ax handle. Her sons had been stabbed.

In 1995, a Gray County jury convicted Skinner of the murders, and he was sentenced to death.

Maybe the jury was right. Maybe he's guilty. But the Medill Innocence Project maintains that Skinner was railroaded, and its researchers point to a raft of reasons to doubt his guilt. The evidence against him is circumstantial. Though physical evidence links him to the crime scene — where he admits to being — it doesn't link him to the murder weapons or the murders themselves. He had no obvious motive. And the state's star witness has recanted, saying that authorities pressured her to testify that he made incriminating statements before his arrest.

Toxicology tests made after his arrest showed that his blood contained enough alcohol and codeine to leave most people comatose or near death. Even a hardened drinker like Skinner would have had difficulty standing, much less killing three people.

Worse, at the trial, Skinner's defense lawyer failed to present evidence about another plausible suspect: Busby's knife-carrying uncle, Robert Donnell (now dead). Busby confided to a friend that Donnell once tried to rape her. And on the night of the killings he was heard making crude remarks to her at a party. She left nervous, and Donnell left soon after.

At the crime scene, a windbreaker that looked like Donnell's lay next to Busby's body.

Skinner's appeals lawyer, Rob Owen of the University of Texas Capital Punishment Center, has called for DNA testing that could place Donnell at the scene of the crime.

Among the items that could be tested are a rape kit; Busby's fingernail clippings; two bloody knives; and the windbreaker. But those tests haven't been done.

We desperately hope that either the U.S. Supreme Court or Gov. Rick Perry will stay Skinner's execution long enough to run the DNA tests.

Before sending a man to die, we need to be absolutely sure of his guilt.