Judge Tom Price, a 30-year veteran Republican jurist on Texas’s highest criminal court, recently stated that those on the state’s death row convicted with evidence from the Houston Police Department crime lab should not be executed until questions about its work are resolved. Price called for a limited moratorium on executions, saying, “I think it would be prudent to delay further executions until we have had a chance to have this evidence independently verified. Once a death sentence is carried out, you cannot reverse that.” The call came after Price offered the only dissenting vote when the Court of Criminal Appeals denied Dominique Green’s request for a delay of execution based on the crime lab’s problems. Green, a Houston man who was sentenced to death in 1992, was executed on October 26. In his dissenting opinion, Price reiterated his concerns about the accuracy of the Houston Police Department’s ballistics analysis as well as the recent discovery of 280 boxes of mislabeled evidence from some 8,000 criminal cases. The crime lab’s problems have plagued the Houston Police Department for nearly two years and have prompted similar calls from the city’s Police Chief, Harold Hurtt, and several lawmakers. Price’s call for a moratorium is the first of this magnitude from state’s judiciary. (Houston Chronicle, October 26, 2004) See Innocence.

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