Lester Bower was executed in Texas on June 3 despite maintaining his innocence throughout the 30 years he spent on death row. The evidence of Bower’s innocence included testimony from a woman who said that her boyfriend and three of his friends — not Bower — had committed the murders for which Bower was executed. The witness came forward in 1989, after reading that Bower had been sentenced to death for the crime her boyfriend had confessed to committing six years earlier. In 2012, a judge rejected Bower’s request to present the testimony to a jury, saying, “the new evidence produced by the defendant could conceivably have produced a different result at trial…it does not prove by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant is actually innocent.” Maurice Possley, a senior researcher for the National Registry of Exonerations, explained the judge’s decision: “He points out in pretty clear terms that this guy probably would have been found not guilty had this evidence been available at trial. But now, all these years later, he can’t meet the new standard, which is actual innocence. That was not the standard at trial. Then it was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” Samuel Gross, editor and co-founder of the registry, said, “To me it’s one of the most troubling features of our justice system. In the absence of procedural error, you have no effective escape valve. We don’t have a procedure for reviewing convictions for accuracy.”
(T. Madigan, “Did Texas Execute an Innocent Lester Bower?,” Politico, June 14, 2015.) See Innocence.
