Austin, TX, United States (AHN) – Texas may have wrongly executed a man in 2000 for murder, according to DNA tests conducted after a legal battle between a non-profit and local prosecutors. The findings don’t prove innocence of Claude Jones, but bring scrutiny to attorneys who urged the governor against a stay of execution without mentioning the convict’s requests for DNA testing.
According to the Innocence Project, tests on a single strand of hair used to convict Jones showed that the hair did not belong to the convict but to the victim.
The tests followed a court ruling in favor of the Innocence Project and the Texas Observer, which had sued the San Jacinto County District Attorney’s Office to gain access to the evidence and to prevent the hair from being destroyed.
Jones was convicted in 1990 for the murder of a liquor store owner, Allen Hilzendager, during a robbery the previous year. He had admitted to being with two other accomplices in the robbery but maintained his innocence against the charge of murder.
His conviction was based on the single strand of hair and testimony from one of his co-accused who received a lighter sentence in exchange for cooperating with authorities and who later recanted his testimony in a sworn affidavit.
A man with a long list of convictions, Jones had appealed his conviction and requested a 30-day stay of execution so DNA testing could be done on the hair. Government documents show that the same month Jones was executed, officials had omitted information about DNA testing and requests from Jones for such tests in their recommendation to then-Gov. George Bush against a stay of execution.
Bush was in the middle of the 2000 White House recount at the time but had issued a stay months before for a convict. “Any time DNA evidence can be used in its context and can be relevant as to the guilt or innocence of a person on death row, we need to use it,” he had said.
“I have no doubt that if President Bush had known about the request to do a DNA test of the hair…. Jones would not have been executed,” Barry Scheck, co-founder and co-director of the Innocence Project, said in a statement.
“It is unbelievable that the lawyers in the General Counsel’s office failed to inform the governor that Jones was seeking DNA testing on evidence that was so pivotal to the case,” Mark White, one of Bush’s predecessors as governor and a former state attorney general, added. “If the state is going to continue to use the death penalty, it must figure out a way to build safeguards in the system so that lapses like this don’t happen again.”
San Jacinto County District Attorney Bill Burnett has not issued a statement. He had rejected the Open Records Act request for access to the hair to conduct DNA testing and announced plans to destroy the evidence in 2007.
Texas has the highest number of executions nationwide. The state has faced controversy over its handling of capital cases in recent years.
Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 and was prosecuted using “flawed science,” according to an inquiry this summer by the Texas Forensic Science Commission. The case of another Texas death row inmate seeking DNA testing, Hank Skinner, is before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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