Tag Archives: Claude Jones

Is Texas Death Penalty Unconstitutional?

December 2, 2010 at 1:10 PM

That’s the question that District Judge Kevin Fine in Houston will be deciding in the next couple of weeks.  A hearing in the case of Texas v. Green, starting Monday, Dec. 6, will put the Lone Star State’s capital punishment system on trial, and by all accounts it will be a wide-ranging affair.  Evidence of the sentencing and execution of innocent men, the use of bogus science, and other egregious mistakes and examples of general incompetence will be considered to determine if the death penalty, as currently administered in Texas, is too prone to error to be allowed to continue.  (Green’s challenge to the Texas death penalty is here.)

The constitutionality of the death penalty in principle is NOT under consideration, just the way it is practiced.  The cases of Claude Jones, Cameron Todd Willingham, and Ernest Ray Willis will among the primary examples of how deeply flawed the practice of Texas capital punishment has become.  Well-intentioned reform efforts from, for example, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, have been smothered by political pressure, so maybe the courts can be the avenue for serious investigations into the major malfunctions of the Texas death penalty.

The state’s judicial system, with judges elected all the way up to and including the highest court, has not been known for courageous critical examinations of Texas justice, but evidence of wrongful convictions, wrongful death sentences, and wrongful executions may have – at last — become impossible to ignore or sweep under the rug.

Whatever the outcome of this hearing, it will be a welcome ray of sunlight on the dismally dysfunctional Texas death penalty.

DNA Test Exposes Execution Based on Bad Evidence

November 12, 2010 at 10:20 AM

Claude Jones was sentenced to death based on one hair.  That hair, prosecutors insisted, was his, and placed him at the scene of a 1989 killing at an East Texas liquor store.  Now, 10 years after his Dec. 7, 2000 execution, the Texas Observer reports that DNA tests have concluded that the hair was the victim’s, not his.  Normally, after someone is put to death, no tests are carried to determine if the execution was wrongful.  These tests were only carried out as a result of a lawsuit filed by the Observer, the Innocence Project, the Innocence Project of Texas and the Texas Innocence Network.

Jones was a career criminal who was involved in a plot to rob the store.  But to execute him, Texas needed to convict him of the murder, and for that they relied of the forensic technique of hair matching, something we now know to be a kind of junk science.    This week’s DNA results, which directly contradict the conclusions drawn by the state’s forensic hair expert,  do not CONCLUSIVELY prove Jones’ innocence in the killing (since they don’t implicate an alternative suspect), but they do mean that there is now no physical evidence tying Jones to the crime for which he was put to death.

In the hours leading up to his execution, Jones had asked for a DNA test of this lone hair, but the courts rejected that request, and then Governor George W. Bush declined to intervene.  Interestingly, it appears that Governor Bush’s lawyers neglected to mention the request for DNA testing in the memo they gave him.  Bush had previously granted a reprieve to allow DNA testing, so we are left to wonder what he might have done in this case, if he had known.

We do know now that, as in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, Claude Jones was convicted on the basis of fundamentally flawed evidence.  And, despite the existence of appeal courts, the clemency process, real DNA science, and other supposed safeguards, his execution could not be stopped.