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Thread: Henry Watkins "Hank" Skinner - Texas

  1. #81
    Senior Member Frequent Poster PATRICK5's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Heidi View Post
    I can't believe I am about to say this....At he/she's defense. He is young and doesn't have the knowledge that the majority of consistent posters on this forum have. Maybe I am being optimistic this evening, but I think if he were to actually read court opinions and understand them he may be able to decipher the truth from the smoke and mirrors presented on the anti-death penalty sites.
    I don't know her age but she's been trolling pro DP blogs for years. She's missing the empathy gene.

    Quote Originally Posted by Heidi View Post
    psst....he/she it's thughuggers not lovers.
    Hugging leads to loving --and these people want Polaroids.

    Speaking of Polaroids, didn't they stop making it? What are the groupies going to do for their souvenir photos of their thugs?

    In the state's brief, they mentioned that Skinner claimed that he caught Twila in bed with another man that day. I have no idea if true or not. If true, I wouldn't be surprised if the vaginal swab comes up with someone else's dna. However, there is no evidence that she was raped and it is more of a motive for him to have killed her.
    Obama ate my dad

  2. #82
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Attorneys have agreed on items to be tested for DNA in the case of a Texas Panhandle man on death row for the slayings of his girlfriend and her two grown children.

    Hank Skinner once came within an hour of execution for the 1993 killings of Twila Busby and her two sons in Pampa. His execution was last stayed in November.

    Earlier this month, the Texas Attorney General's office reversed its longstanding objection to testing several items Skinner's lawyers wanted to have examined. On Tuesday, both sides filed a joint court motion that includes a list of 40 pieces of evidence.

    The list includes vaginal swabs taken from Busby and two knives found in or around her home.

    Prosecutors say a windbreaker found at the crime scene couldn't be found.

    http://www.statesman.com/news/texas/...g-2398332.html
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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  3. #83
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    For your entertainment.

    Witness Implicates Alternative Suspect in Texas Death Penalty Case

    By David Protess
    President of the Chicago Innocence Project

    Camera rolling, a student-journalist hands the witness a photo taken by police at a gruesome crime scene. The witness studies the photo and turns away, seemingly repulsed. Then she tears up.

    It isn't a photo of the female murder victim, Twila Busby, or her two adult sons, butchered in their Pampa, Texas home on New Year's Eve in 1993. Rather, it's a color photo of a tan jacket, stained with blood and sweat -- and found next to Twila's lifeless body. Based on the stain patterns, the jacket was likely worn by the killer, an expert concluded.

    But the jacket didn't belong to Hank Skinner, who was convicted of the slayings and sentenced to death in 1995. So whose was it, the young reporter wanted to know?

    "I am 100 percetn sure this was Robert Donnell's jacket," the witness declares. "He wore it all the time."

    The witness, Deborah Ellis, knew Donnell well. Her parents lived next door to him in Pampa at the time of the murders and Donnell's wife, Willie Mae, was "like a grandmother to me," Ellis says.

    Ellis also knew that Donnell was Twila's alcoholic uncle who'd harassed her at a New Year's Eve party the night of the murders, and that he'd left the party after Twila and hadn't returned home for hours. Soon afterward, Ellis saw him suspiciously scrubbing the interior of his pick-up truck and replacing its rubber floorboards.

    But police arrested Hank Skinner instead because he was in the home at the time of the crime, disbelieving his claim that he'd passed out on the couch from drinking vodka laced with prescription meds. And, despite a witness and two toxicologists who corroborated Skinner's story, he was convicted and dispatched to Texas' death row -- coming within 47 minutes of execution before the Supreme Court issued a stay.

    Following the stay, on a warm April afternoon in 2010, Deborah Ellis told my journalism students what she distinctly recalled from the time of the murders. It's a story she's told for years, in bits and pieces, to police officers and defense lawyers. But never before had Ellis been shown a photo of the actual jacket and asked if she could identify it.

    The students, who'd come to Pampa to interview residents about the case, peppered Ellis with questions. After telling her chilling story, she agreed to repeat it on camera. You can watch the interview by clicking here.

    What made Ellis notice that Donnell wore that particular jacket?

    "He just wore it all the time. He wore it to go to the store. He wore it to take the trash out. He wore it outside, doin' whatever he was doin' outside."

    Had she seen Donnell wearing the jacket after the murders?

    "I never saw Robert wearing the jacket after the murders. Ever. And we didn't think about it first, but after the fact, we never saw the jacket again."

    Had she looked for it?

    She and Willie Mae Donnell "started looking for the jacket, [but we] never found it. Anywhere. In any of Robert's belongings or anything."

    And the kicker: Had Robert threatened Willie Mae after she began asking about the murders?

    "[Willie Mae] was questioning him about what happened to Twila and her boys. He told her that if she didn't shut up and quit talking to him about it... that she would end up the same way that they did... He would kill her like he killed them."

    The students, exhilarated by the breakthrough in the case, called me with the news. The next day, Ellis signed a sworn statement based on her interview.

    Although the Donnells had died years earlier, we knew that Robert's genetic profile would not be difficult to obtain. We thought that forensic testing of the DNA-rich jacket might corroborate Ellis' statement and finally bring the truth to light.

    As it turned out, we were wrong.

    ***
    The tortured history of DNA testing in Hank Skinner's case began a year before his trial, when D.A. John Mann ordered forensics on only those items that placed Skinner at the crime scene, a fact he never disputed. Mann didn't have the jacket tested. Nor did he test the bloodied murder weapons or the rape kit.

    When I chided Mann about this on Court TV in 2000, he promised to test all the remaining evidence. That never happened. Instead, he chose 14 additional items that he believed would resolve lingering questions about Skinner's guilt. Much to Mann's dismay, however, three of the DNA results excluded Skinner -- blood from gauze found on the sidewalk in front of the victims' home, blood on a tape cassette and a hair clutched in Twila's hand.

    Mann promptly halted further testing, and his no-DNA policy was followed by his successors, D.A.'s Rick Roach and Lynn Switzer. Meanwhile, Skinner's lawyers launched a counter-offensive in 2001, seeking court-ordered forensics on the more than 40 items of evidence that had never been tested -- including the tan jacket.

    For more than a decade, Texas lawmen fought the testing. They lost before the U.S. Supreme Court, they lost before the Texas legislature and they were about to lose earlier this year before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals when they finally relented. On June 1, they agreed to test the unexamined evidence.

    Two weeks later, they made a stunning admission: The jacket had vanished. "No one's ever been able to find that thing," shrugged Gary Noblett, who manages the Pampa police department's evidence room.

    Skinner's lawyers were outraged. "Mr. Skinner has insisted that this jacket should be tested because it may have been worn by the assailant," said attorney Rob Owen. "It is difficult to understand how the State has managed to maintain custody of items as small as fingernail clippings, while apparently losing something as large as a man's windbreaker jacket."

    On July 5, the 40 surviving items were sent to a state-run lab for DNA analysis. Perhaps the results will show, once again, that Skinner was in the home that terrible night. Perhaps they will show that someone besides Skinner and the victims was also present.

    Either way, the 18-year debate over Skinner's guilt or innocence will likely continue to rage, with both sides questioning results that challenge their point of view about the case.

    Deborah Ellis thinks she knows what happened, but wishes DNA tests could prove it. Tragically, the hope for scientific certainty may have been dashed the day Texas lawmen lost a bloodied jacket found at the scene of a triple homicide.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-...b_1656016.html
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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  4. #84
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    An article by Brandi Grissom. So you only need to read the first paragraph and last sentence!

    AG Says DNA Tests Implicate Hank Skinner in '93 Murders

    DNA testing that death row inmate Hank Skinner sought for more than a decade further implicates him in the New Year’s Eve 1993 triple murder for which he was sentenced to die, according to an advisory that the Texas Attorney General’s Office filed Wednesday in Gray County state district court.

    But a lawyer for Skinner, who was convicted in 1995 of the murders of his live-in girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two adult sons in Pampa, said the DNA testing is incomplete and indicates that another person may have been at the scene of the crimes.

    “We find it troubling that the Attorney General’s Office has seen fit to release partial results of the DNA testing and submit its ‘advisory’ to the court while the DNA testing is still in progress,” said Rob Owen, co-director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Capital Punishment Clinic, in an emailed statement.

    Skinner has steadfastly maintained his innocence, claiming that he was unconscious on the couch at the time of the killings, intoxicated from a mixture of vodka and codeine. Beginning in 2000, he pleaded for DNA testing that he argued would prove his claims. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed his execution less than an hour before he was scheduled to die and agreed to hear arguments in his case. Skinner sought testing on a slew of crime scene evidence that was not analyzed at his original trial, including a rape kit, biological material from Busby’s fingernails, sweat and hair from a man’s jacket, a bloody towel and knives.

    Lawyers for Skinner and the state finally agreed in June to testing. In the advisory filed Wednesday, state lawyers said the DNA results further confirmed that Skinner, 50, was responsible for the murders.

    “DNA evidence collected at the crime scene consistently indicated Skinner was guilty of strangling and bludgeoning Ms. Busby to death in the living room of her home on New Year’s Eve 1993,” the advisory states. “Crime scene evidence also showed that Skinner was responsible for the stabbing deaths of Randy Busby and Elwin ‘Scooter’ Caler.”

    The AG’s office reported that a rape kit did not indicate that Busby was sexually assaulted, and vaginal swabs did not reveal DNA from any other person. Fingernail scrapings and hairs from Busby’s body also did not reveal another person’s DNA, the advisory states.

    The DNA results, state lawyers wrote, also show that Skinner’s blood was found in the back bedrooms of the house, where Randy Busby was found stabbed to death in the back. Skinner’s DNA was identified in blood stains from a tape, in two blood stains on a tennis shoe, a blood stain from the bedspread, a blood stain on a cassette holder and on a blood stain near a dresser in the boys’ bedroom.

    Skinner’s DNA was also found on the handle of a bloody knife that was recovered from the front porch of the home, along with DNA from Caler and at least one other contributor, who was not identified.

    But testing was not done on a man’s jacket found at the scene, because that item had been lost. Owen has said the jacket is a critical piece of evidence that must be tested, because it looks like one that Twila Busby’s uncle Robert Donnell wore.

    Skinner has argued that investigators should have looked at Donnell, who has since died. Donnell had a history of violence, and witnesses reported that he was making advances toward Busby shortly before the murder.

    "According to the State, every other single piece of evidence in this case has been preserved,” Owen said previously in a statement about the missing jacket. “It is difficult to understand how the State has managed to maintain custody of items as small as fingernail clippings, while apparently losing something as large as a man's windbreaker jacket.”

    Owen told the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in May that if DNA testing on all the evidence pointed to someone other than Skinner, then it could create reasonable doubt about his client's guilt.

    Owen said conclusions about Skinner’s guilt cannot be confirmed until all other possible DNA contributors are identified. He said additional testing has been requested to try to identify DNA from unknown contributors that was found both on the bloody knife and on the carpet in the boys’ bedroom.

    “All the parties must do everything in their power to make sure Texas does not make an irreversible mistake,” Owen said.

    State lawyers had long opposed testing in Skinner’s case, arguing that it could not prove that Skinner was innocent and that it would create an incentive for other guilty inmates to delay justice by seeking DNA testing.

    But in May the judges on the nine-member appeals court expressed skepticism of the state’s reticence to allow testing. Shortly after the hearing, the Texas Attorney General’s Office reversed its decade-long objection to testing and filed an advisory seeking to test DNA in the case.

    In Skinner's case, initial DNA testing results in 1995 implicated him by showing that he was at the crime scene, a fact he has not contested. His trial lawyers decided not to seek testing on all of the evidence because they feared it would further implicate him in the crime.

    http://www.texastribune.org/texas-de...ner-93-murder/
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  5. #85
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    I, for one, cannot wait to hear the lies that Skinner comes up with to try to explain the at least 7 different places bloody dna of his were found in the house. Remember, he never cut his hand at the house. That never happened, it happened days earlier.

  6. #86
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  7. #87
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Edited

    In a statement released last Wednesday, Skinner's attorney Rob Owen criticized the state for jumping to conclusions about the DNA results obtained thus far. Indeed, Owen noted that testing is still ongoing – notably, on two items where a mixture of DNA, including that of an unknown person has been found. While no DNA was found on one of the knives in the house, a mixture of DNA, including Skinner's, Caler's, and that of an unknown person, was found on a knife collected from the front porch of the house. A similar mixture of DNA was found on a sample of carpet collected from the sons' bedroom. "We will remain unable to draw any strong conclusions about whether the DNA testing has resolved the stubborn questions about Hank Skinner's guilt or innocence until additional DNA testing has been completed, and the data underlying that DNA testing has been made available to our experts for a detailed review," Owen said. Additional testing is needed to amplify the unknown DNA profile so that it can be loaded into the national law enforcement database to search for a match, Owen said. The profile has been run through Texas' DNA database but didn't generate a hit. Details about the discovery of the unknown profile were not included in the AG office's court advisory.

    For more than a decade, the state fought against allowing post-conviction testing for Skinner – this summer, a lawyer for the state argued before the Court of Criminal Appeals that to allow testing after all these years would be to incentivize defendants charged with capital crimes to forgo testing at trial in order to request it at a later date as a tactic to stall execution. That argument didn't appear to impress the CCA, and before the court issued a ruling the state withdrew its objection, agreeing with Owen to the list of items submitted to the Lubbock lab. Notably, no male DNA was found on the vaginal swabs, nor was there any foreign DNA found on the fingernail clippings. Similarly, seven hairs found clutched in Twila's hands were matched to her DNA; no DNA was obtained from 10 other hairs.

    Moreover, still outstanding is the question of whether Skinner will be able to have tested the bloodstained windbreaker: Shortly after the state agreed to testing, it was revealed that the state has lost the jacket. No one with the Pampa Police Department or the Gray County Sheriff's Office has seen the jacket in years, and it is unclear if anyone is actively searching for it. The jacket is key to Skinner's case, Owen said this summer, because it looks like a jacket that was regularly worn by Twila's uncle Robert Donnell, who had been seen stalking her at a party shortly before she was murdered. The AG's office has not responded to questions about the missing jacket.

    http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/...-murder-scene/
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  8. #88
    Needtounderstand
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    Is he guilty or innocent finally? I try to understand....

  9. #89
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Skinner is still GUILTY!!
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  10. #90
    Needtounderstand
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    @heidi,

    Ok,but I regret that there are a lot of cinema for nothing...

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