The Austin American-Statesman says that the Texas judicial system failed to protect against the possibility of executing an innocent person. “The lack of interest in fairness and justice by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in capital cases continues to baffle, frustrate and infuriate”, says the Statesman.

The Statesman is right, but there may be change coming. The Court of Criminal Appeals could be under new leadership this year if someone in the Texas House files articles of impeachment against Presiding Judge Sharon Keller because of her unethical behavior on Sept 25, 2007 when she violated the unwritten rules of the court and refused to accept an appeal from a man set for execution that day and did not notify the duty judge of the request to submit an appeal.

EDITORIAL
U.S. Court stops execution that Texas courts wouldn’t
Experts believe condemned man Swearingen could not have committed the murder.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Once again, a federal court has had to intervene to prevent Texas from executing a death row inmate whose conviction is in doubt. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday issued a reprieve to Larry Swearingen, whose execution by lethal injection was scheduled for today.

And once again, Texas courts and local injury attorneys did nothing to prevent a possible miscarriage of ultimate justice. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had denied Swearingen’s petition to hear new information from pathologists who reviewed the case. Nor did Gov. Rick Perry issue a reprieve. And Texas Attorney General Abbott opposed Swearingen’s appeal to the 5th Circuit, which ruled that Swearingen’s petition could be heard by a federal district court.

Expert scientific analysis strongly indicates Swearingen might not have committed the 1998 murder of college student Melissa Trotter, 19. Based on a report by four pathologists, Swearingen’s attorney with the help of experts in San Francisco based employment attorneys appealed to the state criminal appeals court, the governor’s office, the federal appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court asking for a stay of execution to review the information.

One of those pathologists with a new interpretation of the case is former Harris County Chief Medical Examiner Joye Carter, who performed the autopsy on the victim. Carter says her original estimate of the time of death was wrong, as do several other professionals.

This case is about timing. Trotter was last seen leaving the Montgomery County Community College campus in Conroe with Swearingen on Dec. 8, 1998. Her body was found in Sam Houston National Forest near Conroe on Jan. 2, 1999. She had been strangled, and a portion of her panty hose was found around her neck.

Swearingen was a good bet for the crime. He was twice accused of rape and had been seen with Trotter the day she disappeared. There was other circumstantial evidence implicating Swearingen, too. But if he had killed Trotter and left her in the national forest on Dec. 8 or soon after, the body would have been badly decomposed. Instead it was quite well preserved.

Pathologists, including Carter, say the body could not have been in the forest more than 14 days and likely was there as few as four days before it was discovered. If true, that means Swearingen could not have killed Trotter and left her body in the woods because he had been in jail since Dec. 11 on outstanding traffic warrants.

The science behind the claim that Trotter’s body had not been in the forest for more than two weeks is strong. It is based on proven rates of organ decomposition, on insect infestation and other well-tested factors that pathologists use to determine times of death.

This expert analysis presented a strong argument to delay Swearingen’s execution until the information can be evaluated. Had the jury heard these scientific facts during Swearingen’s trial, it might have rendered a verdict of not guilty.

Despite that, neither the state appeals court, the attorney general nor the governor did anything to prevent the execution of a possibly innocent man. The lack of interest in fairness and justice by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in capital cases continues to baffle, frustrate and infuriate.

The Dallas Morning News is reporting that Larry Swearingen’s execution has been stayed.

AUSTIN – A federal appeals court has granted a last-minute reprieve to a Texas man facing execution in the murder of a Houston-area college student, his attorney said.

Larry Swearingen was set to be executed Tuesday for a murder that several pathologists — including the case’s original medical examiner – now say he could not have committed.

He was convicted of the 1998 rape, abduction and murder of Melissa Trotter, a 19-year-old who was strangled and left in the woods.

Several criminal pathologists say the prosecutors’ original theory — that Trotter had been dead for 25 days before she was found – is impossible because of how preserved her body was.

If they’re right, that means Swearingen couldn’t have killed her. He was in jail for traffic violations for the three weeks before the discovery of her body.

“I’m extremely relieved,” said Swearingen’s attorney James Rytting. “It would be a travesty to execute someone under these circumstances – where someone was sitting in jail when someone else killed a woman and threw her body in the woods.”

Prosecutors say regardless of how long Trotter’s body was in the woods, the circumstantial and physical evidence against Swearingen is sufficient. They were able to match the panty hose tied around Trotter’s neck to a piece found in a dumpster next to Swearingen’s Montgomery County trailer. They found fibers traced to Trotter in Swearingen’s truck and home.

Swearingen, who met Trotter two days before the 19-year-old disappeared, was the last person seen with her outside the Montgomery College library.

“It’s disappointing to hear that they’ve stayed this case again. Every time [the defense] claims they’ve got evidence he’s innocent, every time we’re able to show they’re wrong,” said Marc Brumberger, who oversees appellate cases for the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office.

“We’ll just have to hash it out in court once again.”

WFAA 

Friday, January 23, 2009

DALLAS — John Holbrook, a former crime scene photographer, takes portraits of the men and women on death row in Texas. Holbrook’s project began as a way to address his own trauma over seeing horrific crime scene images at work.

The message of Holbrook’s work is ultimately about forgiveness and how it can empower victims to move past traumatic events.

In the featured story, News 8 photojournalist, Doug Burgess, along with reporter David Schechter, take you inside Texas’ Death Row for a rare glimpse at the people behind the headlines.

Holbrook will lecture and exhibit his work at Southern Methodist University on Thursday, January 29th at 7 p.m. at the McCord Auditorium located at 306 Dallas Hall.

Artist’s Statement

 I have been an Investigator licensed with the state of Texas (private Investigator) for 16 years.  I have worked capital murder cases as a court appointed investigator in North Texas.  

One of those cases involved the double homicide of North, Texas teenagers Carrie Crews and Jesus Garza. Carrie Crews was raped, tortured and murdered.  The two perpetrators were James Lee Clark and James Brown.  I was part of the defense for these two defendants. 

While working that case, I spent hours examining the crime scene evidence including the photographs. The images were very graphic.  Some years later, I started to experience ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’.  Whenever he saw anything remotely similar to the injuries done to Carrie Crews (crime scene photographs), I experienced extreme anxiety. 

I saw a psychologist regarding the PTSD.  The Doctor determined that my current photography at that time (pictures of social outcasts shown in a spiritual light) was a subconscious attempt to correct the ‘Bad Pictures’ I saw while working the capital murder case .

Ultimately, I learned that that only way I could overcome his PTSD was to learn how to Love and Forgive those who had caused it; James Lee Clark.

This is ultimately what I am attempting to communicate with these photographs; ‘The only way we can truly stop suffering is to love and forgive those who have caused that suffering’.  

Essentially, my work is more intended to communicate to  all of  the victim’s (loved ones) more than to communicate facts about  the condemned.  I want to teach the victims this liberating truth that I have learned.

As most death penalty abolitionists know, a tool often used by the Texas prosecutor to get the death penalty is the argument that the victim’s (loved ones) endorse the death of the accused.  It is said that the victims, “Need closure”.   With my pictures, I argue that this act severely handicaps the victim’s ability to love and forgive the accused in the future.  To add an element of responsibility or more accurately, the element of guilt with the accused execution, unjustly involves the victims.   It is a grave injustice done to the victims to execute the accused because it virtually denies the victims the ability to love and forgive them in the future, hence; ultimately denying the victims the right to stop suffering.

I am constantly being asked, “You have photographs of both the guilty and most likely innocent on death row, why do you have both, and what is it you are you trying to say”?     I have and always will make great efforts to communicate the following to the viewer and answer this question as follows; “I have deliberately chosen to photograph both the very obviously guilty of their crimes and those who are very obviously innocent of their crimes.  This difference is irrelevant to the point I am making, so I will not communicate these differences to you.  If you feel compelled to discover these differences yourself, it’s easily done”.

I maintain that, it takes a work of art to ultimately address the collective consciousness  that is America.  It was the American book entitled, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ that spoke to this collective consciousness and turned the tide against slavery in America.    I hope that my images will modestly follow in these footsteps and finally address that entity that will finally help turn the tide against the death penalty.

For more information about these pictures, please visit my web site:

http://www.holbrookphoto.com/

January 2009
Texas Monthly

The Science of Murder

Someone killed Melissa Trotter and dumped her body in the Sam Houston National Forest. But according to six forensic experts, that someone was not Larry Swearingen.

by Michael Hall

Innocent men in prison often have two things in common. They stubbornly refuse to plead guilty, even if it means a reduced sentence or freedom. And they never quit trying to prove their innocence, whether it’s by writing letters to lawyers and journalists, filing writs on their own, or just camping out in the prison library studying law books or anything else that could help their cases. The wrongly convicted never give in, and they never give up.

Larry Swearingen, an eight-year resident of Texas’s death row, is almost certainly a member of this unhappy group. From the beginning, when he was arrested in December 1998 for murdering Melissa Trotter in rural Montgomery County, just north of Houston, he has insisted he didn’t do it. He never asked for any kind of a plea deal, once saying, “I’m not going to plead guilty to something I didn’t do.” He took the stand at his trial and testified that he didn’t kill Trotter. Ever since, he has worked diligently from his cell at the Polunsky Unit to prove his innocence—filing writs to the court system, writing letters to journalists, even poring over climatological charts to prove his case.

But there are other reasons besides pride and perseverance to believe that Swearingen didn’t kill Trotter. Six different physicians and scientists—forensic pathologists and entomologists—say there’s almost no way Swearingen could have done it. One of those doctors was instrumental in convicting Swearingen back in 2000 but has now changed her mind after seeing all of the evidence. Dr. Glenn Larkin, a retired forensic pathologist in Charlotte, North Carolina, says, “As a forensic scientist since 1973, I always kept an objective stance when called to testify; however, there comes a point when as a human, and as a Christian, there is a mandate to speak in the interest of justice. This is a moral issue now; no rational and intellectually honest person can look at the evidence and conclude Larry Swearingen is guilty of this horrible crime.”

And it is a moral issue with real urgency. Swearingen just got an execution date of January 27. His lawyers are frantically trying to get a stay of execution as well as DNA testing. If they don’t succeed, it is entirely possible, even likely, that the State of Texas will execute an innocent man in two and a half weeks.

A Shaky Case

Back in 2000, the prosecutors of Montgomery County used mostly circumstantial evidence, some of it remarkably weak, to convict Swearingen. Trotter was a nineteen-year-old student at Montgomery College in Conroe when she disappeared on December 8, 1998. An extensive search was organized, and her body wasn’t discovered until January 2 in the Sam Houston National Forest by a couple of hunters—in an area that had been already searched three times. She had been strangled with one leg of a set of panty hose. Around her neck and face there was some decomposition from maggots as well as evidence of rodent scavenging. She was clothed but her shirt had been bunched up around her neck, and though her torso was bare, it showed no evidence of having been scavenged by the wild pigs, crows, raccoons, or vultures that live in the forest. Her corpse was not bloated, and police reported no foul smell. In fact, the hunters had initially thought she was a mannequin. The body appeared to have been in its final resting place for only a short period of time.

Swearingen, an ex-con who was working as an electrician, had met Trotter on December 6 and asked her out on a date. She stood him up the next day, but on December 8 they rendezvoused on campus. That same day she disappeared, making Swearingen one of the last people to see her alive. Three days later, he was arrested for outstanding traffic warrants and put in jail, where he remained after becoming a suspect in Trotter’s disappearance. When her body was found, Swearingen had already been in jail for three weeks.

Though no one saw Trotter leave the campus with Swearingen, the state was able to stitch together a tenuous narrative that had Swearingen kidnapping her in his truck, taking her to his trailer, raping her, killing her, and dumping her in the forest. (In order to get the death penalty, prosecutors had to prove murder in tandem with another felony, such as kidnapping or rape.) The motive? Prosecutors brought forward testimony from construction worker pals of Swearingen’s who said he had been furious at being stood up. As for proof about the kidnapping, there were witnesses who saw the two together on campus earlier that day, and there were fibers found on her jacket that “appeared to be” from Swearingen’s jacket and other fibers found on her and her clothes that were “similar to” carpet fibers from his trailer and truck seat.

Swearingen made two cell phone calls that afternoon, and because the calls were routed through a tower near the crime scene, the prosecution said that proved he had dumped the body there. As for proof of rape, Harris County chief medical examiner Joye Carter, who did the autopsy, found no evidence of violent penetration of Trotter, but she did say there was some discoloration of the vaginal wall. Though this could have come from normal intercourse, the prosecution used this as evidence that Swearingen had raped Trotter. When the Court of Criminal Appeals later took up Swearingen’s appeal, it admitted, even as it affirmed his guilt, “The forensic evidence is inconclusive.”

The most damning piece of evidence against Swearingen was another leg of panty hose found in the trash outside his trailer four days after Trotter’s body was located. Even this was not as clear-cut as it should have been. When the fabric was found, the trailer had already been fruitlessly searched twice by half a dozen deputies who turned up nothing. It was matched to the piece around Trotter’s neck by a DPS criminologist. Swearingen’s appellate attorney James Rytting wrote in an appeal that the pantyhose matching “was not based on scientific or forensic principles. The pantyhose material . . . can be easily stretched or distorted, so ‘matching’ may easily be the artifact of the examiner’s manipulations, whether intentional or unconscious.”

The case wasn’t entirely circumstantial. The state also called medical examiner Carter, who testified that she thought Trotter had most likely been killed on or about the day she disappeared. She based her opinion on the body’s external condition—the decomposition and maggot activity around the head and neck. She wasn’t asked—and didn’t tell—about the condition of the body’s internal organs, which were remarkably intact for a person who had supposedly been dead for so long.

The defense had two important things on its side that should have given the jury pause. Most critically, blood was found underneath one of Trotter’s fingernails and DNA analysis proved it was not Swearingen’s. Also, a pubic hair found in a vaginal swab was found not to be his. But the defense pathologist didn’t question why Trotter’s body was in such good shape, nor did the expert question the prosecution’s theory that she had died on or around December 8. The jury found Swearingen guilty and gave him the death penalty in June 2000.

The Science of Death

It wasn’t until Swearingen was given his first execution date, January 24, 2007, that he began to get medical science on his side. First came the bug guys, or forensic entomologists, who use insect larvae found in corpses to figure out time of death. On January 22, appellate attorney Rytting filed a habeas corpus appeal anchored by the testimony of an entomologist who said that, based on temperature reports that said the average temperature that month was 50 degrees with highs in the mid-70’s, the earliest those maggots could have begun colonizing her body was December 18—a week after Swearingen was put in jail. (Swearingen himself, while studying the temperature data, had found a crucial error in the numbers that showed it had actually been warmer than the climatologists had initially reported.)

The CCA stayed the execution and called for a hearing to look into the matter in the trial court. At the hearing, another entomologist, James Arends, testified; he noted that there was no evidence of maggot colonization in the anal and vaginal regions, as would be expected in a body left in the wild for so long. He also pointed out that the body hadn’t been picked on by the thousands of wild pigs, crows, and vultures that live and feed in the forest. (Or, as he wrote in an affidavit, “It is very common to find near to complete skeletonization, and bones scattered over a wide area by scavengers, in cases where remains of missing persons are not recovered for significant periods of time after being left in locations such as the location in this instant case.”) Arends’s conclusion? Trotter’s body had been there no longer than a week.

Pathologist Luis Sanchez, the current Harris County medical examiner, also testified at the hearing, saying that a body in the forest 25 days would show more decomposition, color change, bloating, and skin slippage. He also explained that the autopsy showed Trotter’s internal organs had been in good enough condition to be pulled out and sectioned; however, organs begin to break down upon death. The pancreas, for example, usually liquefies completely within 24 to 48 hours. Sanchez’s conclusion: The body hadn’t been in the forest for more than 14 days.

Unbelievably, the CCA denied that appeal without even commenting on the forensic science. Rytting filed another habeas appeal last year that included affidavits from Larkin and Lloyd White, the Deputy Tarrant County Medical Examiner. Larkin said, “December 23 is the soonest that Trotter’s body could have been left in the woods, which is to say, twelve days after Mr. Swearingen was incarcerated.”

White thought the conditions of the organs made it more likely Trotter died close to January 2, 1999. He viewed photos of her heart; they revealed that “the muscle is still red and relatively fresh looking . . . the appearance of the heart is what one would expect to find upon an autopsy of a recently deceased individual.” White also wrote, “Unfortunately, the conviction in this case rests upon misleading forensic pathological testimony.”

He was referring to the words of Joye Carter. She had moved on from Harris County, but Rytting tracked her down in Marion City, Indiana, where she was the chief forensic pathologist. He got her to reread the Trotter autopsy report and other materials—such as the temperature reports. Carter realized she had made a mistake, and now she submitted her own affidavit, in which she admitted it. By her calculations, the body had been in the forest for only 14 days, not 25. Carter based her new opinion on the condition of Trotter’s bare torso as well as her internal organs. Plus, she noted how Trotter had weighed 109 pounds at a doctor’s examination on November 23; when found, she weighed 105. As Larkin wrote in his affidavit, “even if a corpse is not scavenged, a body will lose up to 90 percent of its weight in less than 25 days.”

Once again, the upshot of all of this is simple: Trotter was murdered while Swearingen was in prison. Rytting added other claims in the 2008 appeal—that detectives knew Trotter was getting threatening phone calls from another man and that there was evidence that Trotter and Swearingen had actually been dating. The CCA again asked the trial court to hold a hearing to look into these allegations—but only the latter ones, not the ones dealing with pathology or entomology. Again, the highest court in the state said nothing about the science or the doctors and their claims that Trotter was killed long after Swearingen had been locked up. “How can that not merit a new trial?” asks Rytting. “In order to merit a new trial, we have to show that, given the new evidence, no rational juror would have convicted Swearingen. There is solid forensic evidence to show this and there is nothing to counteract it on the other side except for Carter’s testimony, which she has since recanted. The truth is, if they tried Swearingen today he would walk. You put the testimony of those physicians and scientists in front of a jury, they’re going to acquit.”

Reckoning

The CCA denied those final two claims in December, and Swearingen was given his new execution date: January 27. At this point, he doesn’t have a lot of options. Rytting will petition the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to try and get them to allow another federal appeal, though the federal standard for bringing in new evidence is tough. On January 7, Rytting, with help from the New York–based Innocence Project, filed a request for a stay of execution—as well as more DNA testing. The attorneys want to use modern-day short tandem repeat (STR) testing, unavailable in 2000, to compare the DNA profile taken from the blood found under Trotter’s fingernail and put it into the federal CODIS database of DNA profiles of 6.3 million convicted offenders. They also want to use the new technology of “touch DNA”—it can detect DNA left behind in skin cells (it recently exonerated the parents of JonBenet Ramsey)—on the panty hose around Trotter’s neck and on her clothes, under the theory that the killer left cellular evidence behind as he dragged Trotter’s body through the forest.

It would be nice if, at this late date, the CCA showed some respect for science and granted the testing. It would also be nice if the high court took a step back and showed some respect for all the medical science it has ignored in Swearingen’s case. His conviction was based, as Dr. White said, on “misleading forensic pathological evidence”—as well as flimsy circumstantial evidence. Of course, cases are tried on circumstantial evidence all the time (often, that’s all law enforcement can find), but when circumstantial evidence is as tenuous as this was, and when it butts up against scientific evidence—when one says one thing and the other says another—you would like to think that the highest court in the state would at least give the science a look.

The bottom line: Someone killed Melissa Trotter and dumped her body in the Sam Houston National Forest. But that someone was not Larry Swearingen.