Two Death-Row Prisoners with Innocence Claims Die on Death Row, Two Days Apart.

Two death-row prisoners who have long asserted their innocence, one in North Carolina and the other in Alabama, have died of cancer on their state’s death rows.

Carl Moseley, who was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer in June 2021, died on February 17, 2022, after spending 30 years on death row in North Carolina for the murders of two women last seen at a Forsythe County dance club and bar. He was 56 years old. Earlier in the day, his lawyer, Christine Mumma of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, the state attorney general’s office, and local prosecutors had filed a consent order for DNA testing in his case. Mumma said she would press for posthumous testimony to fulfill Moseley’s wish to clear his name.

On February 19, 2022, William Kuenzel (pictured, left, with his appeal lawyer, David Kochman) died on Alabama’s death row after what his legal team described as “a long battle with cancer.” He was 60 years old. Kuenzel spent 34 years on death row after being sentenced to death in 1988 for the murder of a store clerk in a trial that lasted only 14 hours. The evidence presented against him consisted of testimony by a co-worker, Harvey Venn, who implicated Kuenzel only after being arrested for the murder himself, and a teenage eyewitness who claimed to have seen Kuenzel and Venn in the store that night. The only physical evidence of the crime was blood found on Venn’s pants.

Kuenzel had a corroborated alibi that put him 25 miles away from the store at the time of the murder with no access to a car. His court-appointed counsel conducted minimal factual investigation in the case. The prosecution withheld from the defense evidence that Venn had the same type of gun that was used in the murder and had bruises consistent with damage done to the victim’s body; that the teenage eyewitness had told the grand jury in the case that she could not identify the men in the store that night; that Venn’s 13-year-old girlfriend told the police and the grand jury that she saw Venn that night and that he was alone; and that when Venn was first arrested, he said that he was with a different person the night of the murder, gave a description of the man and his name and address, but the police never tried to find the man. No court ever reviewed the evidence of Kuenzel’s innocence because his lawyers missed a filing deadline by five months.