Claude Jones was sentenced to death based on one hair. That hair, prosecutors insisted, was his, and placed him at the scene of a 1989 killing at an East Texas liquor store. Now, 10 years after his Dec. 7, 2000 execution, the Texas Observer reports that DNA tests have concluded that the hair was the victim’s, not his. Normally, after someone is put to death, no tests are carried to determine if the execution was wrongful. These tests were only carried out as a result of a lawsuit filed by the Observer, the Innocence Project, the Innocence Project of Texas and the Texas Innocence Network.
Jones was a career criminal who was involved in a plot to rob the store. But to execute him, Texas needed to convict him of the murder, and for that they relied of the forensic technique of hair matching, something we now know to be a kind of junk science. This week’s DNA results, which directly contradict the conclusions drawn by the state’s forensic hair expert, do not CONCLUSIVELY prove Jones’ innocence in the killing (since they don’t implicate an alternative suspect), but they do mean that there is now no physical evidence tying Jones to the crime for which he was put to death.
In the hours leading up to his execution, Jones had asked for a DNA test of this lone hair, but the courts rejected that request, and then Governor George W. Bush declined to intervene. Interestingly, it appears that Governor Bush’s lawyers neglected to mention the request for DNA testing in the memo they gave him. Bush had previously granted a reprieve to allow DNA testing, so we are left to wonder what he might have done in this case, if he had known.
We do know now that, as in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, Claude Jones was convicted on the basis of fundamentally flawed evidence. And, despite the existence of appeal courts, the clemency process, real DNA science, and other supposed safeguards, his execution could not be stopped.