DNA shows Texas man may have been wrongly executed
town of Point Blank, population 559. Authorities said his getaway driver was Danny Dixon, previously convicted of shooting a girl between the eyes and burying her in a cemetery.
During the trial, a forensic expert testified that he examined the hair under a microscope and concluded that it could have come from Jones but not from Dixon or the store owner. No DNA test was performed for the trial.
Prosecutors also hammered on Jones’s brutal past. While serving a 21-year prison sentence in Kansas, he poured a flammable liquid on his cellmate and set him on fire, killing him.
Jones was executed in December 2000 at age sixty, the last person put to death during Bush’s time as governor. In his final statement, Jones did not acknowledge guilt but told the Hilzendager family he hoped his death “can bring some closure to y’all. I am sorry for your loss and hey, I love all y’all. Let’s go.”
At the time, Jones was pressing the governor’s office for permission to do a DNA test on the hair. As the execution drew near, however, the briefing Bush got from his staff did not include the request for the DNA test, and Bush denied a reprieve, according to state documents obtained by the Innocence Project.
Scheck said he believes “to a moral certainty” that Bush would have granted a 30-day reprieve had he known Jones was seeking DNA testing. A spokesman for Bush, who is on a book tour, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It is absolutely outrageous that no one told him that Claude Jones was asking for a DNA test,” Scheck said. “If you can’t rely on the governor’s staff to inform him, something is really wrong with the system.”
More than three years after the execution, Jordan recanted his claim that Jones admitted to being the triggerman. In an affidavit, Jordan said he was scared, and “I testified to what they told me to say.”
Texas is far and away the No. 1 death penalty state, having executed 464 people over the past three decades.
Fox News notes that the Jones case is second time this year that the guilt of an executed Texas inmate was thrown into doubt. Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death in 2004 after being convicted of setting the 1991 fire that killed his three daughters. But several renowned experts said earlier this year that the investigation of the fire was so flawed that the arson finding can’t be supported.
The hair in the Jones case was tested ten years after the execution at the request of his son Duane, along with the Innocence Project, other groups, and the Texas Observer magazine. Prosecutors agreed to the testing.
“At the very least, if they had tested his DNA before he was executed, he could have gotten a new trial or his sentence overturned or changed,” Duane Jones said Thursday. He said his father “told me that he had robbed banks, that he was a thief. But he wasn’t a person who would go out and murder someone on the street.”
