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Thread: Larry Ray Swearingen - Texas Execution - August 21, 2019

  1. #21
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Order can be found here

  2. #22
    Banned TheKindExecutioner's Avatar
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    Heidi, what do you think? It looks like there could be some REAL questions here. I mean just because he was seen talking to some girl that doesn't mean he killed her! I'm sure she talked to several people that day so what about the rest of them??

    As you can tell by my name that I'm VERY pro DP but I don't believe the cops should be grabbing people off the street and killing them! It's VERY rare for the Texas courts to halt an execution so there could be something here.

  3. #23
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    Considering the medical examiner changed her testimony, I think they should take another look at the case. My question is, if the forensic testimony was false and we are to believe Trotter was dead for 2 weeks before she was found, where was she for 10 days prior to her death?

  4. #24
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    WOW! Texas may actually reverse a DP verdict! That's as rare as a dinosaur sighting!

  5. #25
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    In Death Row Case, Scientific Data May Finally Get Its Day in Court

    By BRANDI GRISSOM

    Following is a link to Grissom's article published in today's Texas Tribune and New York Times. I am not posting the article because her added flair drives me crazy!

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/us...wearingen.html

  6. #26
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    Swearingen Back in Court

    Attorneys involved in the Feb. 27 hearing of convicted killer Larry Ray Swearingen will meet Monday morning to discuss details of his return to court.

    The meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. Monday in the 9th state District Court of Judge Fred Edwards.

    Swearingen, 40, was sentenced to death in 2000 for the abduction and murder of 19-year-old college student Melissa Trotter. Her body was found Jan. 2, 1999, in the Sam Houston National Forest, 25 days after she was last seen leaving the Lone Star College-Montgomery campus off Texas 242.

    Swearingen was scheduled to die in Huntsville by lethal injection on Aug. 18, 2011, but the state Court of Criminal Appeals ruled his petition met the requirements for another hearing.

    Swearingen contends forensic evidence made it impossible for him to be at the crime scene. The appeals court agreed Swearingen could not have advanced that claim in January 2009. It also ruled the hearing will address an alleged error of testimony by a pathologist.

    It was Swearingen’s third stay of execution. He previously received stays in 2007 and 2009.

    The meeting Monday is designed for the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office and Swearingen’s defense team “to discuss the scope of evidence” that will be presented Feb. 27, said Assistant District Attorney Bill Delmore of the appellate division.

    “This will not be an evidentiary hearing,” Delmore said. “We want to make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to experts.”

    In October, Edwards appointed Conroe attorney Steve Jackson to represent Swearingen during next month’s hearing.

    Jackson said the other two members of Swearingen’s legal team, James Rytting and Philip Hilder, are excellent tort attorneys, and Jackson has spent the past few months getting up to speed on the case.

    “What I’ve learned is that their evidence makes it impossible for Mr. Swearingen to have committed the crime when the prosecution said it did,” Jackson said.

    http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/couri...a00583882.html



    If you are to believe rumor and innuendo both Larry and his wife are having a not so great time dealing with this court hearing.
    I guess we will find out on the 27th what that is all about.

  7. #27
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Dissecting the Science of Death

    The question of whether the science of death and decomposition can prove that Larry Swearingen, now on death row, was not responsible for the 1998 kidnapping and murder of 19-year-old Melissa Trotter, will be taken up in district court in Montgomery County starting Feb. 27.

    Trotter disappeared on Dec. 8, 1998. It was finals week at Montgomery College where she was a student; she attended a science class review and did some work on a computer in the college's library, then she disappeared. Three days later, Swearingen was arrested on outstanding warrants; he's been behind bars ever since. Although the portion of the Sam Houston National Forest where she was ultimately found had been searched several times, by both law enforcement and others, her body was not discovered until Jan. 2, 1999. Swearingen was subsequently charged and convicted of capital murder and sentenced to die.

    At issue, however, is whether science actually proves Swearingen's innocence. According to Swearingen's defense attorney James Rytting and a bevy of medical experts – including a number of well-respected Texas medical examiners – it is impossible for Trotter to have been dead for more than a few days when her body was found. And if she had been dead for less than a week, Swearingen could not have been the killer because he was already in jail. Specifically at question is whether Trotter's body displayed the kind of decomposition expected of a body left outside for several weeks in the forest in December. According to evidence first provided to the defense in 2009, the answer is no; histological samples of Trotter's heart, lung, and vascular tissue is more consistent with a person dead mere days before she was found.

    The state, however, says the evidence presented by the defense is not the best science to use to determine how long Trotter had been dead. Montgomery county prosecutor Warren Diepraam in late January filed with the court a list of three experts he intends to call during the evidentiary hearing – experts who the state apparently believes can prove Trotter's time of death as concurrent with her disappearance in early December. The state says it will call two forensic entomologists and an out-of-state pathologist, who in 2009 told the state that he concluded Trotter was killed in early December in part based on a decade-old finding that food found in Trotter's stomach was "consistent" with the last food she was seen eating at the college. Others who have viewed photos of the stomach contents say they look not at all like the french fries she was known to have consumed. Moreover, using stomach contents to determine time of death is not exact – indeed, it was among the questionable evidence used to convict Michael Morton for the bludgeoning death of his wife; Morton spent nearly 25 years in prison before being released last year, when DNA evidence linked the murder to another man.

    Moreover, the qualifications of at least one of the bug experts the state says it intends to rely on appear, at face value, not entirely relevant to the Trotter case. In addition to Dr. Neal Haskell – a Saint Joseph's College professor who says in a college bio that he was an inspiration for the TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – the state has notified the defense that it intends to call Sam Houston State University professor Sibyl Bucheli, whose research focuses primarily on moths and butterflies; there is nothing in her curriculum vitae to suggest she has relevant forensic experience.

    Nonetheless, the state says it has also consulted with a number of other scientists – including a forensic pathologist, a forensic anthropologist, an agronomist, an additional entomologist, and a professor of "urban nutrient and water management" – all of whom the state says agree with the conclusions of its primary experts.

    http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/...ence-of-death/

  8. #28
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    Quite a few support websites, and also skepticaljuror.com, state factually that Mr. Swearingen is likely an innocent man, and I have good reason to believe that.. Let us hear the truth,though....

  9. #29
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    I must say I am interested in reading what the hearing reveals.

  10. #30
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    A cry of innocence from death row

    Lawyers for a Texas death row inmate are fighting for the right to constitutional review of a "freestanding" claim of innocence -- one where the inmate says the evidence now shows him innocent but there was no constitutional defect in his conviction years earlier.

    The inmate says the evidence now proves he was in jail at the time the victim was killed.

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in 1993's Herrera vs. Collins, another Texas death penalty case, that a simple claim of actual innocence did not entitle a death row inmate to federal constitutional review, despite the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

    "[Leonel Torres] Herrera's constitutional claim for relief based upon his newly discovered evidence of innocence must be evaluated in light of the previous 10 years of proceedings in this case," the court majority said. "In criminal cases, the trial is the paramount event for determining the defendant's guilt or innocence. Where, as here, a defendant has been afforded a fair trial and convicted of the offense for which he was charged, the constitutional presumption of innocence disappears. Federal habeas [constitutional] courts do not sit to correct errors of fact, but to ensure that individuals are not imprisoned in violation of the Constitution."

    The majority also said Herrera's argument that the 14th Amendment's due process, or fair proceedings, guarantee did not entitle him to a new review.

    The late Justice Harry Blackmun led the dissent.

    "Nothing could be more contrary to contemporary standards of decency ... or more shocking to the conscience ... than to execute a person who is actually innocent," he said.

    "Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable," he added, "so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder."

    Herrera was subsequently executed, protesting his innocence to his last breath.

    The stark truth for condemned prisoners seeking help from the justices is that the Supreme Court is not a trier of fact -- it leaves that to the trial courts, and to a lesser extent the appeals courts. Instead, the high court is engaged in making sure that defendants are treated fairly, regardless of the verdict.

    After all, the inscription on the front of the Supreme Court building across from the Capitol, above the steps, does not promise "Justice Under Law." It promises "Equal Justice Under Law."

    Now the Supreme Court is considering a petition from another Texas death row inmate, Larry Ray Swearingen, who says due diligence by his lawyers proves his conviction, based solely on circumstantial evidence, shows he could not have killed a 19-year-old college student -- though Texas officials strongly dispute that.

    The case has drawn the attention of the Innocence Network, "an association of organizations dedicated to providing pro bono legal and/or investigative services to prisoners for whom evidence discovered post conviction can provide conclusive proof of innocence."

    The 66 members of the network "represent hundreds of prisoners with innocence claims in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand."

    The group's Web site says, "In 2011, the work of Innocence Network member organizations led to the exoneration of 21 people imprisoned for crimes they did not commit."

    In a friend-of-the-court brief to the high court, the group said, "Although the [Supreme] Court's precedents have indicated that the execution of a habeas [constitutional] petitioner who presents a compelling post trial showing of actual innocence would violate the Eighth and 14th Amendments -- even without an accompanying claim of constitutional error -- the [Supreme] Court has yet to recognize a freestanding actual innocence claim."

    The brief said: "Swearingen presents reliable scientific evidence refuting the core forensic testimony against him at trial and conclusively demonstrating that he is innocent of the crime underlying his conviction and capital sentence. As such, his petition compels the [Supreme] Court to take the long deferred step of recognizing a freestanding constitutional right to federal [constitutional] relief upon a persuasive showing of actual innocence.

    "Simply put, the evidence supporting Swearingen's petition conclusively exonerates him of the murder for which the state intends to execute him," the brief said. "Each of the forensic scientists who has examined the pathological and histological evidence -- including the state's sole forensic witness at trial -- has concluded to a scientific certainty that the victim died after Swearingen [already] was incarcerated" on traffic charges.

    The lower courts' "assessments of the reliability and credibility of the evidence supporting his claim have been incomplete, fundamentally unfair and inconsistent with this [Supreme] Court's precedents."

    One of those lower courts, a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, agreed with a trial court that Swearingen's claim of actual innocence was not entitled to new constitutional, or habeas, review.

    The panel said a habeas petition is appropriate where the facts underlying the innocence claim "could not have been discovered previously through the exercise of [defense attorney] due diligence," and those facts, "if proven and viewed in light of the evidence as a whole, would be sufficient to establish by clear and convincing evidence that, but for constitutional error, no reasonable fact-finder would have found the applicant guilty of the underlying offense."

    But Swearingen did not meet that threshold.

    Swearingen contended "he learned for the first time in 2008 of tissue samples [used to determine time of death] that exonerate him of the murder of Melissa Trotter," the panel said. "He further contends that he could not have discovered the existence of the samples prior to 2008 and that his attorneys provided constitutionally ineffective assistance by failing to uncover and employ this evidence."

    The panel agreed with the trial judge "these arguments are unavailing. The evidence existed at the time of trial [in 2000] ... and even if it were not discoverable through due diligence, it does not constitute 'clear and convincing evidence that, but for constitutional error, no reasonable fact-finder would have found [Swearingen] guilty of the underlying offense.'"

    Trotter, a student at Montgomery County (Texas) Community College, disappeared in December 1998. Her body was found in the Sam Houston National Forest, strangled and her throat cut, less than a month later.

    A convenience store security camera showed Trotter and Swearingen meeting two days before she died. At the time, he gave her his pager number.

    Though neither Swearingen nor is wife smoked, a package of Trotter's favorite cigarettes and a lighter were found in Swearingen's trailer, state officials said. Also found in the trailer was a pair of pantyhouse with one leg missing. The state said the cut on the pantyhouse matched -- "a unique physical match" -- the jagged cut edge of the pantyhouse leg used to strangle her and left on the body.

    Three days after Trotter's disappearance, police attempted to question Swearingen as a potential witness, but he fled in his pickup truck, state officials said. He was arrested on outstanding traffic warrants before being charged with Trotter's murder.

    The state told the U.S. Supreme Court in its own brief of a number clues that pointed to Swearingen as the killer. Officials also argued the forensic experts looking at tissue from Trotter's body mainly focused on when the body was dumped in the national forest, not when she was killed -- Dec. 8, 1998.

    Swearingen was convicted in a jury trial. His execution has been postponed by the courts three times, the last time in August.

    The Supreme Court should decide whether it wants to review the case, and consider the concept of a "freestanding" claim of innocence, sometime within the next month.

    http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/...#ixzz1nUVqFKj9

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