Innocent Man Wrongly Executed?

One of the forty men executed in Texas in 2000 might be, in fact, innocent and his death a mistake, or at least this is what the results of a DNA test seem to say. The test, done by Mitotyping Tehnologies and published by the Texas Observer magazine, was performed on the hair that represented the most important evidence in the case of Claude Howard Jones, the man senteced to death for murder.

According to the prosecution, in November 1989 Jones entered a liquor store in Point Blank and asked the owner, Allen Hilzendager, to give him a bottle of wiskey. When the man turned to get the bottle, Jones allegedly shot him three times with a Magnum revolver, before taking $900 out of the cash register and flee in a getaway car waiting for him outside. In the getaway car were waiting Jonesʼ two accomplices, Kerry Daniel Dixon Jr. and Timothy Mark Jordan. Three days later, the three men committed another robbery, this time on a bank in Humble, Texas, obtaining $14,000 in lot. And with the money they went on a weekend trip to Las Vegas.

Claude Howard Jones was arrested three weeks later in Florida, while trying to rob another bank. He already had a long criminal record, including eleven prior convictions in Texas for various crimes such  as murder, armed robbery, assault, and burglary. Jones served six years of a 9-year prison sentence from 1959 to 1963 and then another three years of a 5-year sentence from 1963 to 1965. Eleven years later he was convicted of murder, robbery, and assault in Kansas and received a life sentence, and, while in Kansas prison, Jones killed another inmate. Neverthelss he was paroled in 1984.

During the trial, the prosecution produced as evidence the testimony of several witnesses placing Jones at the scene of the crime, including a man who heard the shots and saw Jones leaving the liquor store, as well as the testimony of Timothy Jordan, who testified against his partner in crime and said that Jones admitted to be the triggerman. But the most important piece of evidence was a strand of hair found at the murder scene, which tests said it belonged to Jones. He was senteced to death for capital murder and executed in December 2000, while Dixon was received a 60-year prison term for murder and Jordan a 10-year prison term.

Throughout the trial Claude Howard Jones argued that he did not kill Allen Hilzendager and that, in fact, he was waiting in the car and that another one of his two accomplices was the one who shot the victim. And now the DNA test might prove him right.

In 1989 forensic sicence was limited and the strand of hair was examined under a microscope, where it appeared to belong to Jones. Later on, forensic specialists gave up such tests, after they found out they were inconclusive and obsolete, especially with the development of DNA testing. However, no DNA test was performed on the hair found in the liquor store, although Jones requested several times his execution to be postponed until such a test would be done. His request was denied by George W. Bush, who back then was the governor of Texas, despite the fact that Bush was a defender of DNA testing in death penalty cases and even had previously halted other executions for evidence to be properly tested. But in Jonesʼ case, Texas Observer believes, the attorneys in his office forgot to tell him that such a test might exonerate the defendant.

Ten years after the execution of Claude Howard Jones, a DNA test performed on the strand of hair showed that Jones was ”excluded as the contributor of this questioned hair.” And, in fact, the hair belonged to the victim. Nevertheless, this does not prove that Jones is innocent, because the test does not implicate another shooter, but it simply shows that there was not enough evidence to sentence him to death and execute him. As the hair was the only piece of physical evidence placing Jones at the crime scene, the DNA test raises serious doubts about his guilt. Now the final answer is in the hands of a judge, who has to decide on whether Jones was wrongly executed or not.

Texas is the state with the largest number of executed men, over 464 people being put on the death row in the past three decades. But so far thare has never been a case in which someone was definitively proven innocent after being executed. And these new DNA test might give the opponents of the death penalty the argument they wre looking for: that the legal system is flawed and that capital punishment could result in a grave and irreversible error.

And Claude Howard Jonesʼ case might not be the only one in which an innocent man is executed on the basis of out-dated forensic evidence. Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death in 2004 after being convicted of setting the fire that killed his three daughters. But six years after his execution a group of experts argued that the investigation of the fire was so flawed that the arson finding can’t be supported.