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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