Radley Balko writes a lengthy article for the July edition of Reason, "Wrongful Convictions: How many innocent Americans are behind bars?" Here's the beginning of this must-read:
When Paul House was finally released from prison in 2008, he was a specter of the man who had been sentenced to death more than 22 years earlier. When I visit his home in Crossville, Tennessee, in March, House’s mother Joyce, who has cared for him since his release, points to a photo of House taken the day he was finally allowed to come home. In that photo and others from his last days in prison, House is all of 150 pounds, ashen and drawn, his fragile frame nearly consumed by his wheelchair. In most of the images he looks days away from death, although in one he wears the broad smile of a man finally escaping a long confinement.
When House’s aunt called to congratulate him on his first day back, his mother handed him her cell phone so he could chat. He inspected the phone, gave her a frustrated look, and asked her to find him one that worked. That kind of Rip Van Winkle moment is common among people freed after a long stint in prison. Dennis Fritz, one of the two wrongly convicted men profiled in John Grisham’s 2006 book The Innocent Man, talks about nearly calling the police upon seeing someone use an electronic key card the first time he found himself in a hotel after his release. He thought he’d witnessed a burglar use a credit card to jimmy open a door.
“Paul’s first meal when he got home was chili verde,” Joyce House says. “It’s his favorite. And I had been waiting a long time to make it for him.” And apparently quite a few meals after that. House, now 49, has put on 75 pounds since his release. More important, he has been getting proper treatment for his advanced-stage multiple sclerosis, treatment the Tennessee prison system hadn’t given him.
The years of inadequate care have taken a toll. House can’t walk, and he needs help with such basic tasks as bathing, feeding himself, and maneuvering around in his wheelchair. His once distinctively deep voice (which had allegedly been heard by a witness at the crime scene) is now wispy and high-pitched. He spends his time playing computer games and watching game shows.
In the hour or so that I visit with House, his mental facilities fade in and out. Communicating with him can be like trying to listen to a baseball game broadcast by a distant radio station. He will give a slurred but lucid answer to one question, then answer the next one with silence, or with the answer to a previous question, or just with a random assortment of words. He frequently falls back on the resigned refrain, “Oh, well,” delivered with a shrug. The gesture and phrasing are identical every time he uses them. It’s what House says to kill the expectation that he will be able to deliver the words others in the room are waiting for. It’s his signal to stop waiting for him and move on.
In 1986 House was convicted of murdering Carolyn Muncey in Union County, Tennessee, a rural part of the state that shoulders Appalachia. He was sentenced to death. His case is a textbook study in wrongful conviction. It includes mishandled evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, bad science, cops with tunnel vision, DNA testing, the near-execution of an innocent man, and an appellate court reluctant to reopen old cases even in the face of new evidence that strongly suggests the jury got it wrong.
Earlier coverage of the Paul House case begins at the link.
More on House v. Bell -- the 2006 Supreme Court ruling -- via Oyez. House's case is one of those covered in Capital Punishment Stories, a book published by Foundation Press and the subject of a 2007 symposium at UT Law.
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