The court reviewed the all the evidence and found that the results would have not been favorable to Skinner. The statement says if the evidence had originally been available during the original trial Skinner would have been convicted anyways.(sic)
The latest numbers:
The total cost to Gray County for his case is $341,200. This includes the cost of the original 1995 trial, the 1996 appeal and DNA testing that was performed in 2001.
Skinner has been incarcerated since March 31, 1995, which calculates to:
While a spokesman with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice could not say the cost per day of housing a death-row inmate, he said the average cost per inmate is around $50. Based on that number, taxpayers in Texas have spent about $347,250 to house Skinner on death-row.
44 1/2 minutes long, but well worth watching. I've often wondered what it would be like to be on Death Row and Skinner gives a cursory glimpse of that existence. As the video went on, I found myself in the place of the condemned being driven to the death house, looking out the window along the drive and seeing the beauty...and the ugliest...all the while knowing it was the last landscapes I would ever see.
The video is completely one-sided, the maker of the video making no bones about being against the death penalty. It doesn't paint Pampa in a particularly good light, especially in the scenes where it shows only the worst and ugliest parts of this small town.
I didn't realize it until I watched the video that I used to roughneck with a guy who had, several years prior, lived at the house where the murders were committed; I had driven by there doing some research for the book I had intended to write, but didn't recognize it as the place where my co-worker had lived, that I had been inside the house and visited with him and his family. I don't know why I didn't remember that when I was researching the book.
Personally, I've gone back and forth on Skinner's innocence; at first, I thought he didn't do it, then was convinced he had. Now, I'm not so sure. The uncle that Skinner claims to have done it died in a car wreck several years later after the murders and another witness* has also passed away. I've interviewed Skinner's ex-girlfriend (whose house he was found at after the murders) and I understand why her recanting her trial testimony has been discounted: she's not a credible witness.
*Witness, in this case, doesn't mean "to the crime" but rather a person with "evidence" offered to prove Skinner's innocence. In this instance, it was someone in jail who claimed to have called the house just before the murders and being told by one of the victims that Skinner was passed out on the couch.
It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out. As it is, it's a landmark case in how DNA evidence will be treated in future trials and subsequent appeals.
The wife of Hank Skinner, a man awaiting execution on death row in the US for a murder he says he did not commit, is leading a campaign to give him the chance to prove his innocence.
However, as time passes Skinner is beginning to see death as more of a relief than a form of punishment.
Thirteen people have been executed so far this year by the state of Texas. Hank Skinner narrowly avoided becoming the fourteenth. He was granted a stay of execution minutes before he was due to be put to death for murdering his girlfriend and her two sons, a crime he says he can prove he did not commit.
“They won’t give me access to the evidence I need to prove my innocence, and meanwhile they are trying to kill me. All the evidence that we’re asking them to test, by the way, is evidence that they have identified as being important in the case,” Skinner says.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked the execution of a Texas man who says DNA testing could clear him of the triple slaying that has sent him to death row.
The justices' order Wednesday could allow Hank Skinner access to evidence that he says could demonstrate his innocence. The 47-year-old Skinner faced lethal injection for the bludgeoning and strangling of his girlfriend, 40-year-old Twila Jean Busby, and the stabbings of her two adult sons at their home in the Texas Panhandle town of Pampa on New Year's Eve in 1993.
Just heard this on the news (and the Houston Chronicle article linked to above is less than ten minutes old at the time of this posting) Skinner was less than an hour away from being executed.
The death penalty has always held a gruesome fascination for me. I've read every thing the local library has on the subject, from factual novels such as Caryl Chessman's books, to Stephen King's fiction (made into a movie) The Green Mile. I also own a book with an article by Skinner, WRITING FOR THEIR LIVES: Death Row USA
I've extensively researched Skinner's case and while I think he is guilty of this crime, I also believe he should be afforded a new trial and that the DNA testing should be done. I hope this latest ruling by the SC will allow the testing to proceed.
The US Supreme Court has suspended the execution of convicted murderer Hank Skinner after a plea from France and his defense lawyers to allow further DNA tests.
I KNOW this isn't true. Who the hell listens to the French on ANYTHING!!!
Larry King interviews Skinner's wife and a man who was proven innocent by DNA testing.
Just as Hank Skinner was finishing his final meal on earth -- two chicken thighs, a double bacon cheeseburger, fried catfish, onion rings, French fries, a salad with ranch dressing and a milkshake -- he received the phone call he never thought was coming. His life had been spared by the United States Supreme Court.
HOUSTON — A condemned inmate set to die next week for a triple slaying 16 years ago in the Texas Panhandle has had his execution date put off for a month.
Henry Watkins Skinner, 47, faced lethal injection Feb. 24 for the 1993 New Year's Eve killings of Twila Jean Busby, 40, and her two grown sons at their trailer home in Pampa.
State District Judge Steven Emmert on Tuesday reset Skinner's date to March 24 to resolve what lawyers said was a timing problem with the original death warrant.
The judge said the paperwork was not completed properly within 10 days of when he signed the warrant last November and Skinner's attorneys had filed a motion to have the warrant dissolved.
"I figured the safest bet was to back up and start over," Emmert said Wednesday.
From the Texas Tribune: Case Open
Twila Busby was Hank Skinner’s soul mate. “We just fell together. We just clicked, man,” he says. The two were hardly apart after they met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They would kiss in public and cuddled up on the couch to watch thrillers. They were “sick in love,” Skinner says through a telephone receiver behind a Plexiglas window on Texas’ death row unit in Livingston.
A jury found that Skinner was so sick in love that, in a jealous rage, he strangled Busby, bashed in her head and face with an axe handle and then stabbed to death her two mentally disabled adult sons on New Years Eve 1993. He was sentenced to death for the three murders. His execution is scheduled for February 24.
The 47-year-old doesn’t deny he was in the small house in the tiny West Texas town of Pampa on the night of the murders or that the blood on his clothes that night belonged to 41-year-old Busby and her sons. But Skinner and his lawyers say there’s no way he could have killed anyone; he was so loaded on vodka and pills that he was nearly comatose. They argue that his appointed trial attorney, a former district attorney who had previously prosecuted him for theft and assault, failed to adequately investigate other potential suspects. They insist Texas is about to execute an innocent man — and the state has evidence that could prove it. Read the rest of the story
UPDATE: The 2nd part of the story: Case Open: The Investigation
