(The Root) -- On May 7, officials at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as "ol' Parchman," planned to strap Willie Jerome Manning to a gurney and pump a lethal cocktail of drugs into his veins at precisely 7 p.m.
But just five hours before he was set to die, the state's Supreme Court halted Manning's execution. Attorneys for the U.S. Justice Department had found that the one piece of forensic evidence offered against Manning -- by an FBI expert who testified with certainty that a hair found in a murder victim's car belonged to Manning -- was "invalid," throwing the convicted man's guilt into doubt.
With that new information and after a series of hearings, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered DNA testing on the hair after years of refusing to do so. The results are still pending, but in the meantime, another man may have been saved by the use of DNA evidence.
Manning's case has attracted national attention and the assistance of legal heavyweights Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, co-founders of the New York-based nonprofit the Innocence Project. In some ways, what's happened to Manning is emblematic of American justice and the state of its most severe and irrevocable penalty: capital punishment. And the reason, advocates of abolishing the death penalty say, is increasing cultural awareness of DNA science and expectations that it can be used to reach certain, not just likely, conclusions about guilt.
Fighting the Death Penalty From the States
Twenty years after the first prisoner was exonerated because of that science, states around the country have moved beyond questions about the quality and quantity of lawyers in death-penalty cases or how frequently these sentences are handed down when defendants of color are accused of killing white victims. Those issues made headlines in the late 1980s and 1990s. Today, death-penalty opponents are forcing debates about actual innocence and pushing for an end to capital punishment state by state.
Source: The Root, August 1, 2013
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