Miscarried Justice

Supreme Court to consider DNA in death row appeal
Ruling could affect the cases of other inmates facing execution


By CHARLES LANE
Washington Post

LUTTRELL, TENN. - It has been nearly two decades since the body of Carolyn Muncey was discovered under some brush, just 100 yards from her small cabin in this Appalachian hamlet.

The 29-year-old mother of two had been savagely beaten, and her death shook a tiny tobacco-growing community to its roots.

Not long after her slaying, authorities charged Paul Gregory House, a paroled rapist from Utah who lived nearby, with her murder.

In February 1986, a local jury convicted him and sentenced him to death.

Long after the trial, DNA tests were performed on Muncey's clothes. They proved that body fluids on the clothes belonged not to House, as authorities believed and told the jury, but to the victim's husband, Hubert Muncey Jr.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in House's case, the first in which a death row inmate has come to the high court with DNA evidence claiming innocence. The justices' intervention takes place at a time when DNA evidence may be changing the way Americans think about criminal justice, including the death penalty; last week Virginia Democratic Gov. Mark Warner ordered DNA testing in the case of a man executed in 1992, to see whether he was wrongly put to death.

The Supreme Court has never squarely ruled that executing an innocent person is unconstitutional. Appellate courts do not usually concern themselves with new evidence, instead focusing on whether a defendant received a fair trial.

House's lawyers want the court to rule that, in the age of DNA testing, the Constitution guarantees those with particularly strong claims of innocence a chance to seek a new trial, even if the normal appeals process has run out. At a minimum, they say, House is entitled to a new hearing under existing court precedent, which allows death row prisoners with strong claims of innocence to raise separate constitutional issues that would otherwise be barred.

But Tennessee officials argue that House's case is about a duly convicted killer denying the people of Luttrell justice for Muncey's death. While DNA testing may have knocked a hole in the state's case, they argue, its foundations are still solid.

No matter which side wins, the court's ruling could have consequences for the ability of other death row inmates to contest their convictions in federal court.

Two Luttrell women, sisters Penny Letner and Kathy Parker, say that a drunken Hubert Muncey Jr. visited them in 1985, telling them tearfully that he had struck and killed his wife in a moment of anger. Muncey denies any involvement in the murder.

Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, based in Cincinnati, said that in his view the refutation of the semen evidence destroyed the state's entire theory of the crime.

Andrea Yates

(CNN) -- Lawyers for Andrea Yates, the Texas woman convicted nearly three years ago of drowning her children, said Thursday they won't seek her release from a prison psychiatric ward following a court's decision Thursday to overturn her murder convictions.

The Texas 1st Court of Appeals ruled that the convictions should be reversed because an expert witness for the state, Dr. Park Dietz, presented false testimony when he said Yates may have been influenced by an episode of the "Law & Order" television program. No such episode ever aired.

In its decision, the court said the testimony by Dietz "could have affected the judgment of the jury."

George Parnham, Yates' lead attorney, told reporters his client was "surprised and not unpleased" by the ruling. But since Yates -- who had suffered from severe postpartum depression -- is receiving medical treatment in prison, "We are not going to seek her immediate release from where she is.

(She obviously killed the children, but the prosecution lied against her. It is my opinion that she is too mentally ill to go to prison. A state hospital is the place for her). -edgar

Jan. 19, 2006, 7:41AM
DNA test to set man free after 18 years
Houston lawyer pushed for review of evidence, which eliminates man in 1986 assault


By RENÉE C. LEE
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

The persistence of a Houston attorney, who kept digging for DNA evidence to clear his client, will lead to the release of a Montgomery County man who has served 18 years in prison on a sexual assault conviction.

DNA test results released Tuesday eliminated Arthur M. Mumphrey, 42, as the rapist in a Feb. 28, 1986, attack on a 13-year-old girl in the Dobbin area, about 20 miles west of Conroe.

Mumphrey is scheduled to leave the Rufe Jordan Unit in Pampa this week and return to Montgomery County for a Jan. 27 hearing, said his attorney Eric J. Davis. At the hearing, 359th State District Judge Kathleen Hamilton is expected to release him on a personal recognizance bond until he is granted a pardon, Davis said.

Polls show most Americans support the death penalty, but their support is waning. That decline, from 80 percent in 1994 to around 64 percent now, is attributed to the frequency with which legal aid organizations have used DNA testing to prove miscarriages of justice.

The Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic that works to exonerate the wrongly convicted, lists on its Web site 172 DNA exonerations since 1989, including two Texans pardoned for actual innocence last month by Gov. Rick Perry: Entre Nax Karage, who served seven years of a life sentence for murder, and Keith E. Turner, who served four years of a 20-year sentence for aggravated sexual assault.

State lawmakers also are beginning to doubt the infallibility of capital justice. New Jersey legislators passed a moratorium on that state's criminal executions pending a review of the costs and fairness of application. Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey signed the bill Jan. 12 before leaving office.

The state of Illinois maintains a moratorium on executions. Maryland had a moratorium but lifted it. The Associated Press reports that 12 of the 38 states that permit capital punishment have appointed death penalty study commissions.

Texas is not considering a moratorium on executions, but it should. This state's death row holds 410 prisoners; 19 were executed last year. That represented nearly a third of all U.S. executions in 2005. Yet the guilt of a number of Texas capital offenders, including one juvenile offender already put to death, is in dispute.

Death row inmate Anthony Graves was convicted of murder primarily on the testimony of a man who recanted many times over before Graves was executed in 2000 for his role in the crime. Ruben Cantu, executed in 1993, was 17 at the time of the murder for which he received the death penalty. Like Graves', Cantu's conviction was based almost purely on the now-recanted testimony of one man.

Harris County sends more people to death row than any other Texas jurisdiction. It remains to be seen how many of those convictions might have been tainted by the shoddy work of Houston Police Department crime lab investigators.

One might question how meaningful a moratorium on executions will be in New Jersey, where only 10 prisoners reside on death row and the last execution took place in 1963. There's no question, however, that taking a capital punishment time-out in Texas to examine disputed cases could avoid the ultimate miscarriage of justice.

Houston Chronicle