Brandi Grissom writes, "Case Open," the first of two articles looking at the case of Hank Skinner. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the article:
Twila Busby was Hank Skinner’s soul mate. “We just fell together. We just clicked, man,” he says. The two were hardly apart after they met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They would kiss in public and cuddled up on the couch to watch thrillers. They were “sick in love,” Skinner says through a telephone receiver behind a Plexiglas window on Texas’ death row unit in Livingston.
A jury found that Skinner was so sick in love that, in a jealous rage, he strangled Busby, bashed in her head and face with an axe handle and then stabbed to death her two mentally disabled adult sons on New Years Eve 1993. He was sentenced to death for the three murders. His execution is scheduled for February 24.
The 47-year-old doesn’t deny he was in the small house in the tiny West Texas town of Pampa on the night of the murders or that the blood on his clothes that night belonged to 41-year-old Busby and her sons. But Skinner and his lawyers say there’s no way he could have killed anyone; he was so loaded on vodka and pills that he was nearly comatose. They argue that his appointed trial attorney, a former district attorney who had previously prosecuted him for theft and assault, failed to adequately investigate other potential suspects. They insist Texas is about to execute an innocent man — and the state has evidence that could prove it.
The night of the murders, police collected, among other items, clippings from Busby’s broken fingernails, a rape kit, two knives from the crime scene, a bloodstained dishtowel and a man’s windbreaker with sweat and hair on it, but most of it has never been DNA-tested. During Skinner’s trial, prosecutors tested some blood and hair from the scene, but not the fingernails, rape kit, knives, towel or windbreaker. Over the last decade, the state has fought Skinner in court to keep it that way. Prosecutors in Gray County and lawyers for the Texas Attorney General’s Office say Skinner had his chance at trial to test the evidence, but he declined, and the jury spoke; now it's time for him to face the consequences. “It’s already been handled,” Gray County District Attorney Lynn Switzer says. She’s the third DA in Pampa to deal with Skinner, who has sued her in federal court seeking to force release of the DNA. “He doesn’t need to keep trying it over and over and over again. It’s already been handled.”
Skinner’s execution date approaches as Texas faces renewed scrutiny of its famously busy death row and the science used to convict the accused. Since 1973, just 11 death row inmates have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, while more than 440 have been put to death.
And:
In Skinner’s case, attorneys argue that prosecutors selectively used DNA testing to put a potentially innocent man on death row, and that the state is manipulating a 2001 law that allows post-conviction DNA testing to keep him on the path to the death chamber. “The case against him is not open and shut, it’s not ironclad,” says attorney Rob Owen, co-director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Capital Punishment Clinic. “And in a reasonable system, we ought to go the extra mile to rule out the possibility that he is an innocent man before going forward with the execution.”
The motion for post-conviction DNA testing is referred to as a Chapter 64 motion; the law is Chapter 64 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. Skinner has a February 24th execution date. The second installation of Grissom's report, "Journalism students to the rescue?" will be published tomorrow.
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