Law-enforcement technologyDNA shows Texas man may have been wrongly executed
A DNA performed on a single strand of hair from the scene of a deadly store robbery in Texas casts doubt on the guilt of the main suspect, Claude Jones, who was executed ten years ago, during George W. Bush’s last month as the governor of Texas; Jones was pressing the governor’s office for permission to do a DNA test on the hair, but as the execution drew near, the briefing Bush got from his staff did not include the request for the DNA test, and Bush denied a reprieve; Bush had previously shown a willingness to test DNA evidence that could prove guilt or innocence in death penalty cases
A DNA test on a strand of hair has cast doubt on the guilt of a Texas man who was executed ten years ago during George W. Bush’s final months as governor for a liquor-store robbery and murder.
The single hair had been the only piece of physical evidence linking Claude Jones to the crime scene — but the DNA analysis found it did not belong to Jones and instead may have come from the murder victim.
Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, a New York legal center that uses DNA to exonerate inmates and worked on Jones’s case, acknowledged that the hair does not prove an innocent man was put to death. He said, though, that the findings mean the evidence was insufficient under Texas law to convict Jones.
Fox News reports that the other primary evidence against Jones came from one of two alleged accomplices: Timothy Jordan, who did not enter the liquor store but was believed to have planned the robbery and provided the gun. Jordan testified that Jones told him he was the triggerman. Under Texas law, however, accomplice testimony is not enough to convict someone and must be supported by other evidence. That other evidence was the hair.
“There was not enough evidence to convict, and he shouldn’t have been executed,” Scheck said.
The final determination of whether Jones was wrongly executed would be up to a judge.
Scheck, a death-penalty opponent, said the case shows that the risk of a tragic mistake by the legal system is just too high. “Reasonable people can disagree about the moral appropriateness of the death penalty. The issue that has arisen is the risk of executing the wrong person,” he said.
San Jacinto County District Attorney Bill Burnett, who prosecuted the case, died earlier this year.
Former San Jacinto County Sheriff Lacy Rogers said he is convinced Jones committed the crime — “without a doubt in my mind.”
In the nearly thirty-five years since capital punishment was reinstated in the United States, there has never been a case in which someone was definitively proven innocent after being executed. That would be an explosive finding, since it would corroborate what opponents of the death penalty have long argued: that the legal system is flawed and that capital punishment could result in a grave and irreversible error.
Jones was condemned to die for the 1989 killing of liquor store owner Allen Hilzendager, who was shot three times outside the
