Wrong man on death row in Texas?

Wrong man on death row in Texas?

Journalism students work to free man awaiting death penalty

NBC's Jim Cummins reports on the case against Henry Watkins Skinner, condemned to die for committing a 1993 murder. A Northwestern University journalism class is raising questions about whether he is guilty.

By Jim Cummins
NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT

DALLAS, June 28 — There’s man on death row in Texas and there are new questions from a crusading class of journalism students who think they can prove him innocent. The most recent figures show there are almost 3700 inmates awaiting execution across the United States. Since the death penalty was reinstated more than 20 years ago some 87 inmates have been freed from death row.

THIRTY-EIGHTY-YEAR-OLD Henry Watkins Skinner has been condemned to die for the 1993 murder of his live-in girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two adult sons in the small town of Pampa, Texas. He insists he’s innocent.
Deputy Police Chief Terry Young was there when Skinner was arrested.
“The blood from the victims on his pants, his attitude, his running…all the evidence put together leads me to believe in my mind, in my heart that he did it,” Young said.
These are the facts the jury heard.
Skinner was in the house when Twila was strangled and bludgeoned and her sons were stabbed to death. DNA tests show the blood of all three on Skinner’s shirt. And the prosecutions star witness — a female friend — testified Skinner came to her house in a drunken stupor after the murders, threatened to kill her and said, “he thought he had killed Twila.”
Skinner was convicted and the jury took less than two hours to decide he should die for the crime.


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AN IMPORTANT ASSIGNMENT
Enter Northwestern University professor David Protess and his eight journalism students, whose research helped free three wrongfully convicted men from death row in Illinois leading to a moratorium on executions in that state.
Governor George W. Bush, whose presidential campaign has been dogged by the death penalty, refuses to consider such a moratorium in Texas.
“George W. Bush has said that he doesn’t have a problem, that the problem is an Illinois problem,” Protess said. “And I sent my students to find out if that was right.”
What they found out was there was lots of other physical evidence, including three bloody murder weapons, flesh, hair, and a rape kit that have never been tested for DNA.


Death row on the Web

	Many states have details on the Web about their capital punishment programs, including:

	•	Texas

	•	Oregon

	•	Arizona

	•	Florida

	•	South Carolina

	•	North Carolina

“Its just disturbing to think that they had evidence,” said Emily Probst, one of the journalism students who discovered this. “They had the truth sitting there but they never tested it.”
And the state’s star witness has changed her story in a new affidavit.
“The woman who claimed that he confessed, admitted now that she made up a story,” said Protess. “That she lied having been brow-beaten by police into saying that Skinner had told her he committed this crime.”
And there is the revelation that Skinner’s lawyer at trial, Harold Comer, is a former DA who prosecuted Skinner twice for other crimes before he was appointed by the judge to represent Skinner at his capital murder trial.
Even Comer admits that is a huge conflict of interest that could overturn this case. Comer says he and the judge told Skinner about it at the time, but that the murder suspect insisted comer represent him anyway. Skinner has a different story.

“I tried to get him off my case,” he said. “But the judge unequivocally told me that he would not remove Comer from my case for any reason.”
“This was a horrible miscarriage of justice,” Protess said. “There’s a substantial chance an innocent man, Hank Skinner, is on death row in Texas.”
Skinner won’t settle for life in prison either.
“I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in prison for a crime I did not commit,” he said. “I would rather be dead.”
Prosecutors still believe Hank Skinner is the murderer. His appeal is now pending before a federal judge in Amarillo.

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