According to a report by Raw Story, two recent exe­cu­tions may have irrepara­bly impaired efforts by sev­er­al pris­on­ers to prove their inno­cence, pre­vent­ing them from pre­sent­ing tes­ti­mo­ny from poten­tial alter­nate sus­pects. Rodney Lincoln was con­vict­ed of the 1982 mur­der of JoAnn Tate and assault­ing her two young daugh­ters and was sen­tenced to two life terms. The pri­ma­ry evi­dence against him was the tes­ti­mo­ny of Melissa Davis, Tate’s eight-year-old daugh­ter who sur­vived the attack. Years lat­er, Davis saw a pic­ture of ser­i­al killer Tommy Lynn Sells and iden­ti­fied him as her moth­er’s killer. She now believes Lincoln is inno­cent. Sells, who con­fessed to sev­er­al oth­er killings while in prison, can­not be ques­tioned about the Tate case because he was exe­cut­ed in 2014. A sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion has arisen in Oklahoma, where Malcolm Scott and De’Marchoe Carpenter have been impris­oned for more than two decades for a dri­ve-by shoot­ing in which Karen Summers was killed. Police arrest­ed a third man, Michael Lee Wilson, who was in pos­ses­sion of the gun and car used in the shoot­ing. Wilson plead­ed guilty to being an acces­so­ry after the fact and was giv­en a five-year sen­tence in exchange for his tes­ti­mo­ny against Scott and Carpenter. Three months after he was released, he robbed a gas sta­tion and killed the store clerk, for which he received a death sen­tence. Two days before his exe­cu­tion, Wilson gave a video­taped state­ment to an attor­ney from the Oklahoma Innocence Project say­ing that Scott and Carpenter had noth­ing to do with Summers’ mur­der. Prosecutors argue that Wilson’s state­ment is an attempt to help fel­low gang mem­bers, but his exe­cu­tion blocks any pos­si­bil­i­ty of further questioning. 

(“How the death penal­ty may keep inno­cent peo­ple in prison,” Raw Story, March 24, 2016.) See Innocence and Arbitrariness.

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