Claude Jones Research Paper

Claude Jones: Innocent or Guilty? Texas is the state with the highest execution rate in terms of number of executed people in the United States of America. There are many convicted criminals who have been sentenced to death here, and eventually executed. Claude Jones was one of them. Jones was, however, a brutal man; he even set a fellow inmate afire during a twenty-one year prison sentence he was serving in Kansas. The question still remains though: was the state of Texas in the right to execute this man? To find this out, the facts of the case should be examined as well as why many contend his execution to have been wrongful and the efficacy of the whole ordeal. In November of 1989 a liquor store owner named Allen Hilzendager was shot …show more content…
The hair was verified under a microscope by a forensic scientist whom concluded that the hair was not the victim’s, or the getaway driver’s. Jones, who always maintained his innocence, appealed to the office of then Governor George W. Bush for a DNA test of the strand of hair as a last resort, but was rejected. Governor Bush’s staff did not mention the DNA test request in Jones’s 30-day reprieve papers, so Bush denied the reprieve not knowing of the request, and Jones was executed. Ten years after Jones’s execution, at the request of Jones’s son, Duane, The Innocence Project, The Texas Observer magazine, and others, the hair was DNA tested. The hair was found not to be Jones’s, but the victim’s. This development would not have proven Jones to be innocent, but it would have meant there was not enough evidence to convict him since testimony alone is not enough to convict someone in the state of Texas. Earlier in the year of Jones’s execution, Governor Bush had granted a DNA testing reprieve to a criminal on death row, which confirmed the man’s guilt, but having not known about the request by Jones, he denied