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As clock ticks toward another Trump presidency, federal death row prisoners appeal for clemency

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President-elect Donald Trump’s return to office is putting a spotlight on the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, which houses federal death row. In Bloomington, a small community of death row spiritual advisors is struggling to support the prisoners to whom they minister.  Ross Martinie Eiler is a Mennonite, Episcopal lay minister and member of the Catholic Worker movement, which assists the homeless. And for the past three years, he’s served as a spiritual advisor for a man on federal death row.

High Court Won't Hear Death Row Inmate's Evidence of Innocence

Larry Swearingen
Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court today refused to consider stopping the execution of Larry Ray Swearingen, a Texas death row inmate who says newly uncovered evidence proves his innocence.

Swearingen's lawyers had asked the high court to decide for the first time whether executing an innocent person constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution.

Lower federal courts declined to intervene in Swearingen's case in part because, as the law now stands, even uncontested scientific proof of innocence isn't a valid reason for a federal judge to stop an execution.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who opposed Swearingen's request for a Supreme Court hearing, said Swearingen's new scientific testimony doesn't outweigh a "mountain" of other evidence "that Swearingen is guilty of capital murder."

Federal courts also don't need to intervene because Texas's justice system provides methods for review of innocence claims, the state attorney general's brief said. A state court has said it will consider Swearingen's claims, Abbott said. Swearingen also could get a pardon or commutation from Texas Governor Rick Perry.


Source: SFGate, Feb. 27, 2012

Related articles:
Jan 27, 2009
Larry Swearingen, 37, faced lethal injection Tuesday evening for the death of Melissa Trotter, whose body was found Jan. 2, 1999, in the Sam Houston National Forest south of Huntsville. The discovery came 25 days after she ...
Jan 23, 2009
Swearingen, a convicted rapist from Willis, became an obvious suspect. The married electrician had been spotted with Trotter. Some of his co-workers said she had angered him a couple of days before her disappearance ...
Jan 26, 2009
Larry Swearingen, 37, faced lethal injection Tuesday evening for the death of Melissa Trotter, whose body was found Jan. 2, 1999, in the Sam Houston National Forest south of Huntsville. The discovery came 25 days after she ...
Jul 29, 2011
Swearingen was convicted of the 1998 kidnap-rape-murder of 19-year-old Melissa Trotter in Montgomery County. Prosecutors have said – and the CCA has previously agreed – that a "mountain" of evidence links Swearingen ...

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