NEW HELL HOLE NEWS
JUNE 29, 2013
New Hell Hole News - #38 June 29, 2013 Hi. I’m sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to you but I’ve been suffering a lot of harassment and life-threatening mistreatment otherwise; had my cell ransacked and destroyed, denied medicine for my high blood pressure and acid reflux, subjected to “leveling” classification for bogus disciplinary cases, placed on level III (the worst most restrictive level), put in a sealed up level III management cell without tempered air ventilation (the butterfly valve in the vent was closed) and consequently I’ve been in a 115°F cell butt naked for 5 days with no property at all and no way to write. My civil attorney came to see my Friday 06.28 and so they gave me limited property; a fan, etc. before she got here because they knew their asses would be in trouble – prisoners who do not enjoy the level of support I have, they do this sorta thing to them indefinitely. “Inhumane treatment” is a vast understatement. Slow motion torture is more accurate. We jokingly call it “mind fuck by Mattel”, a reference to the well-known toy and game manufacturer. I take four kinds of meds for high blood pressure (B.P.) and three of those at the maximum dose. If they are suddenly withdrawn, as they were Tuesday 06.25 to Friday 06.28, I get what they call rebound high blood pressure, which means it goes way higher than it was originally when it was high to start with. When these meds are active, they relax and dilate your veins and slow your heart rate and the force with which your heart beats, lowering your B.P. when they wear off and you’re suddenly denied more medication, your heart begins to race and beats wildly, your veins constrict until you die of heart attack or stroke. That, on top of being sequestered in an unventilated cell on 2 row during inclement weather when it’s 104°F outside, 110°F with the humidity index. They called this “being hot boxed” back in the old days and that’s exactly what it is. Potentially deadly. It’s so hot in this cell right now as I write this, that if I soak two bath towels where they’re dripping for 10 minutes and hang them on my improvised clothes line in my cell, then wet the entire floor ¼” deep in water, it will all flash dry in 30-45 minutes or less. Worse, they’ve been turning off the water for 12-16-24-38-30 hours at a time for the past few weeks, on intermittent days. What’s this say? Why, the state is trying to kill me on the cool of course, to keep my innocence from irrefutably coming to light. They know what I’m doing. If they kill me like this, they’d just say it was “an inadvertent oversight” and I “died of natural causes”, just like they did Jim Vanderbilt and Henry Lee Lucas and several others. Ok, on to the case and exactly where it’s at now and “concrete information” as one would call it: on my daughter’s birthday last year, 05.02.12, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) held oral arguments on my DNA Ch. 64 appeal. The state comes in saying “Oh, his guilt is overwhelming because he failed to call the police and left the scene and went to a neighbor’s house for help instead”. Incidentally, my answers to that are: a) b)
I could not see to dial a phone and even if I could have, the phone jack was jerked out of the wall and the phone disables. The oldest son, Scooter, 6’6”, 245lbs, 22 years old, woke me off the couch, helped me get dressed and we left together. He told me “they’re coming back. We gotta get outta here, now!” So, we did. Scooter went to another neighbor’s house and sat down on the porch and didn’t call the police either. He died of his wounds. His wounds absolutely prove he was involved in a lethal altercation with someone. Yet I don’t see anyone calling him a murderer, no because he died, he’s got to be a “victim” in the state’s eyes.
Judge Alcala rebuked the Assistant Attorney General, Jonathan Mitchell, telling him: “and all that is perfectly explainable by somebody in the house where a murder occurred, who goes to the victims who are bloody, to see if they’re ok, alive or whatever, gets blood on him, is distraught and upset, disoriented, walks four blocks and is not thinking clearly because he’s upset and in shock, he’s just witnessed a horrific act and is intoxicated on alcohol and codeine, not thinking like the most rational person. Isn’t that an alternative, reasonable explanation a jury could credit, if in fact there is DNA of some other person on these items (of evidence)?” Two of the other judges, Cochran and Keasler, suggested that the state should agree to testing but made improper outcome determinative comments: Cochran: “Mr. Mitchell, we’ve had some rather embarrassing incidents in the last couple of years in which totally extraordinary incidents have occurred through the use of DNA, all of a sudden people have popped up and said ‘oh my golly, here was somebody innocent and in prison for all this time!’ and, it seemed preposterous at the time. Why not just lay all this to rest by doing the DNA quickly after these 12 years? Wouldn’t we be better off saying ‘phew, thank goodness! There wasn’t an issue here at all!’ rather than leaving open an issue of concern by everybody?” Keasler: This seems a little different in that, there may be a plausible explanation, it’s worthwhile; you know, you really ought to be absolutely sure before you strap a person down and kill him”… Two months or so later, the state got the message and said, “ok, we drop our end of the appeal, we give! We’ll test the evidence but only in our own DPS labs!” Yeah. Scandal ridden DPS labs… My lawyers felt they had to agree to that because the judge (trial court) is all pro state and would’ve granted that anyway rather than agreeing to a private lab. So the parties made an agreement amongst themselves so we could get at least some concessions out of the state, like no statements to the media until after all testing is complete and after a hearing, etc. But DPS labs are notoriously biased and scandal ridden! All they gotta do to manufacture some pseudo-incriminating results is to load an evidentiary extract sample in the well plate too close to a known standard sample of the “suspect” they want to accuse and when they snap shut the lids and a micro-spray of solution gets into the evidentiary sample, it’s going to come back to the alleged “suspect”. Or, they can just mislabel a known “suspect” sample as an 1
evidentiary sample and than it’s damn sure coming back to him. They’ve been caught red handed doing all that and more, numerous times. The first round of testing identified 3 samples: on the murder weapon (2) and on the carpet (1) in the son’s bedroom on the floor right beside the bed where Randy (180lbs, 6’1”, 20 years old), the youngest son, was killed and the stains are both his and his brother’s blood mixed with an unknown third party’s DNA and we got the complete profile. It’s also true that my DNA was on the knife… mixed with the court reporter’s DNA! Obviously he tried to make some “evidence” when he personally drove the knives and court introduced trial evidence from the courthouse in Wheeler to the DPS lab in Lubbock. Ha/ha. What a dumbass. He should’ve worn latex gloves! Busted!! Then the state – Assistants Attorney General Jonathan Mitchell and Edward Marshall – filed a bogus “advisory” with the court, which says nothing about the exculpatory test results, but instead pleads only generalized conclusory statements not supported by the record or the new tests. Nowhere in this “advisory” do they cite a single line of the DNA report or the record. “The results of (the recent) DPS testing further confirm that Skinner was responsible for the murders of Ms Busby and her sons”… Really? Which results would those be? The ones with somebody else’s blood mixed with the sons? The ones on the knife? the carpet? Both? Idiots! “DNA evidence collected at the crime scene consistently indicated Skinner was guilty of strangling and bludgeoning Ms Busby to death”… My DNA was not found on or anywhere near her body. Someone else’s was. But more to the point, if “DNA evidence” had already proved me guilty, I would’ve been dead 10 years ago and we wouldn’t be conducting this testing. The court told the A.G. their “evidence” is inadequate. “Crime scene evidence also showed that Skinner was guilty of the stabbing deaths of Randy Busby and Scooter Caler”… Really? What evidence is that? The “evidence” that court reporter, Larry Porton, tried to manufacture on the way to the DPS lab in Lubbock and got caught at? All this shit is just so incredibly unbelievable… The Assistants Attorney General’s Mitchell and Marshall then flouted the agreed order by filing this bogus “advisory” with the court and anonymously alerting the media to it. Since it’s public record filed with the court, the media goes to the district clerk’s office and buys a copy, then reports it in the Pampa and Amarillo News and on TV and in the Houston Chronicle and Texas Tribune; just a word for word parroting of the state’s conclusory statements, with no evidentiary proof whatsoever, under banner headlines like “Evidence proves Skinner guilty, again!” and “Results of DNA tests further confirms Skinner’s guilt, A.G says”. While this was going on, we continued into a second round of testing to further identify and define the third party’s DNA profile off the knife – which we did – and off the carpet. It was uploaded to CODIS but got no hits, yet. In the wake of the tests, the state pulled the same crap with a second “advisory” that says nothing but “Skinner’s DNA was there! Skinner did it! Skinner did it! Na-nah-na-nah-nah!!!” Just juvenile BS. Now the trace analysis report says the hairs found ‘clutched’ in Twila’s dead hands are dissimilar from ours and reddish brown – which is her uncle Robert Donnell’s hair color”. So we’re doing mitochondrial testing on those and the other three samples off the carpet stain and the knife to see if we can get a match. That just commenced so it’s going to take a while. Maybe we’ll know some by July. One thing is for sure, it’s not my hair or DNA – I’m black headed, now turning to gray… The jacket. The state still has not produced it. They’re all but admitting it’s irretrievably lost. Their evidence custodian of that time admits “I don’t know what happened to it, after the trial. That thing never made it back from Fort Worth after the trial”… of course not. That jacket was absolute proof of my innocence. The jacket was an man’s XLG 44-46, eight (8) full sizes too big for me – I wear a medium 38-40. 38 to 46 is 8 sizes. The criminalist who examined the jacket and other crime scene evidence before the trial says “the jacket has medium velocity impact spatter in blood all over the cuffs and forearms of the sleeves, indicating if was likely worn by the assailant”. The jacket also has blondish-red-brown hairs inside the collar and sweat stains in the armpits. So it would’ve been a cinch to find out who the assailant was, eh. My sell-out trial lawyer, Harold Comer, himself an ex-D.A. who’d previously prosecuted me for car theft, says he didn’t test the evidence because he “feared it would incriminate” me. Ha/ha. Given the above stated I’ve told you in all the preceding pages of this letter, and the fact that Comer admits I told him from day one I was innocent and never wavered from it. I cannot see how he possibly “thought” it’d incriminate me???!!! I wrote Comer a letter in June of 1994, almost a year before trial and told him I wasn’t going to accept any plea offers; he needed to get ready for trial and, in that regard, hire a fingerprint expert, a toxicologist and a serologist to do he blood work. I didn’t specifically say “DNA”; it was relatively new at that time. But I didn’t have to, it’s serologists who do DNA – in the case at bar the state presented Gary Stalling of the DPS Lab, head of the serology section, who also created and supervised the DNA lab. I told Comer to 2
test the evidence; he just refused to do so. Said, “it’s the D.A.’s job to exonerate as well as convict.” Ha/ha. Plenty of D.A.’s have been caught lying, cheating, concealing exculpatory evidence, tampering with or fabricating pseudo-inculpatory evidence, threatening/coercing false witness testimony and any number of other dirty underhanded tactics (Charles Sebesta in Anthony Graves’ case; Mike Nifong in the Wake Forest Lacrosse team rape case; Ken Anderson in Michael Morton’s case; Travis Ware in the Ralph Erdmann Nazi M.E. “autopsies made to order” case – I could go on and on), but until Craig Watkins made the scene in Dallas, Texas, never saw a D.A. “exonerate” anybody. In fact Craig Watkins twice removed predecessors, Henry Wade and Toby Shook, were responsible for more false convictions than any other D.A.s in Texas history. But here’s the real kicker. The D.A. said I killed Twila first, strangled and bludgeoned her, Scooter walked in on it, I seamlessly switched weapons and began stabbing him; we fought back into the bedroom where I killed his brother in bed by stabbing him in the back. One of the stabs hit bone, abruptly stopping, my hand slid down the handle of the knife cutting my distal (right outer) palm and severing two arteries because it was already slick with Scooter’s blood. If that were the case then my hands would be covered in both Scooter and Randy’s blood and the wound track in my hand would be full of their blood too. So anything I touch after that would leave prints with all 3 of our blood/DNA mixed. My blood would be all over Randy’s back, his bed and Scooter. But it’s not. I say Scooter got me off the couch after he routed the killer out of the house. Whoever killed Twila, on the upswing of the club, broke the ceiling fan light globes – they were shaped like tulips – so there were curved shards of glass all over the living room floor – when I tried to stand up off the couch, I couldn’t. Due to the vertigo caused by my allergy to codeine, I couldn’t stand up, I fell and, throwing out my hands to catch myself, I landed on one of those upturned glass shards cutting my hand to the bone. Scooter picked me up; we went into the bedroom to see about his brother. Scooter leaned on me on the dresser so his hands could be free to check Randy. I still couldn’t stand even with the support of the dresser and fell in the floor in the utility/bedroom doorway. I tried to pull myself up holding onto the doorjamb. Scooter helped me up and we went out the back door together. My bloody handprints on the dresser, on the doorjamb, dripped blood on the cassette tapes and tennis shoes on the floor, and my blood on the back door doorknobs is all only my blood. The blood of the victims is not on my hands! The knife certainly is covered with Scooter and Randy’s blood. So this evidence clearly proves two things: 1) I traveled through the scene only after the fact, looking for survivors as I said and my hand was innocently cut falling on the glass hard after the fact as well; 2) I never touched that knife on the night of the murders; otherwise Scooter and Randy’s blood/DNA would be all over my hands, in the wound where I was cut and consequently all over everything I touched, cited above. There is simply no way out of that. None. So the state lies. I tell the truth. What’s sad, to me, about this is, in the face of this irrefutable evidence the state continues to claim I’m guilty. That’s not just bad form; it’s continued malicious prosecution, persecution and perpetrating a fraud on the court. Jonathan Mitchell, Edward Marshall and Katherine Hayes ought to be charged and disbarred. I’ve lost 20+ years of my life, in the prime of my life, for som’ the evidence has long proven I could not have and did not do, yet nobody really gives a damn and I’m still here awaiting another (and maybe final) execution date. Perhaps you’ll understand why I told Werner Herzog in the interview of me (death row, conversation with Hank Skinner, it’s gotten almost a half million views! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAqRCXm5npc) that I feel like I’m in an old rerun of the ‘Twilight Zone’ episode with Dennis Weaver that I saw when I was 5 years old? One last thing, it’s been said in a Twitterama drama account of my case, that my clothes were “splattered” with the victims’ blood. That’s incorrect. The only stains the state tested were contact stains and the state’s blood experts at trial were forced to concede that evidence proved only that I came into contact with a victim or, a surface upon which they’d deposited blood, at a time after they became bloody – not that I’d one anything to them and, that evidence was perfectly consistent with my claim that I got up off the couch after the fact and moved through the scene trying to render aid before leaving – things now proven as fact. Let me say something else – these are not my “version of events”, as the state tries to pain it in order to make it sound questionable. My “story” has not changed one iota in 20+ years of trial, appeals, other litigation, media interviews, etc. and everything I say is 100% in accordance with and backed up by the record and record evidence. The crap the state now alleges appears nowhere in the record or evidence; it came solely from media propaganda written by that jerk wannabe cop-ghoul Michael Graczyk of the Houston Associated Press, and that punk Edward Lane who writes for the pseudo paper, the Wichita Falls Law Enforcement Examiner. Those matters are covered in my New Hell Hole News posted on my website (www.hankskinner.org) in the “Death Row News” section. See NHHN#36 and #37. One other thing, irresponsible reporting pisses me off! Like, in the Texas Tribune’s last story on my case and the state’s advisories” etc. Brandi Grissom wrote ‘the state has tested hundreds of pieces of evidence which so far failed to exonerate Skinner and, which the state says only further incriminate him – his blood was found on the knife the state claims is one of the murder weapons, along with the blood of Twila Busby’s two sons”. That whole statement is a blatant lie.
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First of all, only 64 pieces of evidence were tested, not “hundreds” and, some of those were multiple extractions from a single piece of evidence. Secondly Twila, Randy, Scooter and I all share the same blood type and sub-type, the state’s expert said they could not determine that it was my blood but only my DNA. However, Scooter and Randy’s blood certainly is on the knife because, in most of the stains, they are the major contributors to the profiles and that couldn’t be so unless it is their blood. In all the samples, my DNA is only a partial profile – that speaks for innocently deposited DNA from normal kitchen use before the murders; the knives came out of our kitchen, they were our sandwich making and brisket cutting knives. Four months or so before the murders, my right thumb was nearly severed off my hand at the base of my thumb in a shop accident. The quack who sewed it up left metal debris and machine oil in it. It got infected and I later had to have the stitches taken out and outpatient surgery done on it to remove the debris and excise necrotized tissue. It was stitched up again and a drainage tube put in it and I was put on high-powered antibiotic – Floxin. We have all the hospital and medical records. I lost 38% of the muscle mass and over 50% of the use of my right hand and I’m right handed! Twila was strangled with hands so powerful they left permanent indentations ½” deep in the skin/flesh of her neck. I couldn’t have done that. At the time, I could hardly hold a hairbrush, nor could I have wielded the club. We had an expert testify to all this at trial, unrefuted, but it did no good. People always think the worst of you and gravitate to the dark side. Juries think you must have done something otherwise you wouldn’t be on trial. I hope all this is concrete enough. Ha/ha. Sincerely, as always Hank 999143 Polunsky Unit H W Hank Skinner 3872 FM 350 South Livingston TX 77351-8580 h.w.skinner@gmail.com http://www.hankskinner.org Facebook http://on.fb.me/Justice4Hank Twitter http://twitter.com/Justice4Hank Newsletter http://eepurl.com/cYCIE For those of you who use JPay to write, don’t forget to always include your postal address and your e-mail address after your signature, so I can reply. www.jpay.com don’t forget to enter my TDC number as an 8-digit number: 00999143.
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