March 19, 2010 - PRESS

PRESS

DNA COULD PROVE A DEATH ROW CONVICT INNOCENT. LET’S TEST IT WHILE HE’S ALIVE EDITORIAL THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

MARCH 19, 2010

It's best to test DNA could prove a death row convict innocent. Let’s test it while he’s alive Editorial – THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE March 19, 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.

The prospect that Texas might send a man to his death without making every effort to be sure of his guilt unnerves even advocates of capital punishment. “It is cases like Skinner's that ended my lifelong support for the death penalty,” Sam Millsap recently wrote in the Chronicle. As Bexar County district attorney, Millsap once prosecuted capital cases. But now he's convinced that “the system we trust to determine who may live and who must die simply doesn't work in all cases.”

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. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/6921848.html