The US Supreme Court halted the execution of a Texas man less than an hour before he was due to die, after an appeal for new DNA tests.
Henry 'Hank' Skinner (47), had been scheduled to die today for the 1993 murders of his girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two adult sons in the north Texas town of Pampa.
Skinner accepts he was in the house where the murders happened, but he insists that DNA testing could exonerate him.
Skinner, scheduled to die in Huntsville prison, Texas, for the New Year’s Eve killings, was visited by his French-born wife as he waited for the US Supreme Court or Texas Governor Rick Perry to decide whether to stop his execution.
His attorneys say his lethal injection should be halted for DNA testing on evidence from the crime scene in the Texas town of Pampa. Results of those tests could support his claims of innocence, they said.
“It’s real scary,” Skinner said recently from death row. “I’ve had dreams about being injected. I didn’t commit this crime and I should be exonerated.”
The former oil field and construction worker said a combination of vodka and codeine left him incapacitated and he had neither the mental capacity nor physical strength to kill Ms Busby (40), and her two adult sons, Elwin Caler (22), and Randy Busby (20).
Prosecutors say Skinner is not entitled to testing of evidence that was not tested before his 1995 trial. Courts over the years since his conviction have rejected similar appeals.
Texas is the most active US state for capital punishment, executing 24 prisoners last year. Skinner’s would be the fifth so far this year.
Criticism escalated in the past year amid questions about evidence that led to the 2004 execution of convicted arson-murderer Cameron Todd Willingham. Prosecutors insist evidence in that case was solid, but an arson expert concluded the investigation was so flawed its finding the fire was set deliberately could not be supported.
Among evidence presented to jurors in Skinner’s case was the blood from two victims on his clothing. His bloody handprints also were found in the bedroom of Ms Busby’s sons and on a door leading out of the back of the house. Prosecutors also suggested Skinner, who had a serious hand wound, cut his hand when a knife slipped during one of the murders. Skinner said he cut it on broken glass.
Police were summoned when the wounded Mr Caler appeared on the front porch of a neighbour’s home. The bodies of his mother and half brother were discovered in their home. Officers followed a blood trail four blocks to the trailer home of a female friend of Skinner. He was found in a closet.
Skinner and his lawyers said the actual killer could have been Ms Busby’s uncle, Robert Donnell, who died in 1997. Donnell, described in court documents as a “hot-tempered ex-con” known for getting more violent when he drank, attended the same New Year’s Eve party.
At the Supreme Court, Skinner’s lawyers argued there were “troubling, unresolved questions about whether Mr Skinner could have committed the murders”.
On Tuesday, Skinner spent several hours with Sandrine Ageorges-Skinner, a 49-year-old French campaigner against the death penalty who married him in 2008. Her visits this week were the first for months because she was banned for prison rules infractions, Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials said.
Skinner’s lawyers wanted DNA testing on vaginal swabs taken from Ms Busby at the time of her autopsy, fingernail clippings, a knife found on the porch of the house and a second knife found in a plastic bag in the house, a towel with the second knife, a jacket next to Ms Busby’s body and any hairs found in her hands that were not destroyed in previous testing.
His trial lawyer, Harold Comer, said he did not have them tested at the time because he feared the results would be even more incriminating.
Lynn Switzer, the Gray County district attorney whose office prosecuted Skinner, has declined to speak about the case because she is the defendant in Skinner’s court claims. The trial prosecutor, John Mann, has since died.
AP