"Dallas County DA wants to re-examine nearly all of pending death row cases," is the Dallas Morning News report written by Jennifer Emily and Steve McGonigle. Here are several excerpts:
Troubled that innocent people have been imprisoned by faulty prosecutions, District Attorney Craig Watkins said Monday that he would re-examine nearly 40 death penalty convictions and would seek to halt executions, if necessary, to give the reviews time to proceed.
Mr. Watkins told The Dallas Morning News that problems exposed by 19 DNA-based exonerations in Dallas County have convinced him he should ensure that no death row inmate is actually innocent.
"It's not saying I'm putting a moratorium on the death penalty," said Mr. Watkins, whose reviews would be of all of the cases now on death row handled by his predecessors. "It's saying that maybe we should withdraw those dates and look at those cases from a new perspective to make sure that those individuals that are on death row need to be there and they need to be executed."
He cited the exonerations and stories by The News about problems with those prosecutions as the basis for his decision. The exonerations have routinely revealed faulty eyewitness testimony and, in a few cases, prosecutorial misconduct.
Fred Moss, a law professor at Southern Methodist University, said he had never heard of another prosecutor in the country who had conducted the type of review Mr. Watkins proposed.
And:
Mr. Watkins has taken steps to halt an execution before.
Last September, he asked to withdraw the execution date for Joseph Roland Lave when the district attorney's office realized that evidence requested by his appellate attorneys was not released and possibly lied about.
Mr. Watkins said that he believes Mr. Lave is guilty but that he was not prosecuted fairly because evidence was withheld. Mr. Lave was sentenced to death for a 1992 robbery and double murder in Richardson.
And:
Mr. Watkins said the cases will be investigated by the office's conviction integrity unit, which was created last year and is reviewing DNA tests requests denied under Mr. Hill.
The district attorney's office will review the oldest cases first because those are the most likely to be set for execution.
Only two men from Dallas County, Gregory Edward Wright and Robert Jean Hudson, currently have scheduled execution dates. Both men were sent to death row in unrelated stabbing deaths of women.
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