High Court to Consider DNA Innocence Claim

Two Luttrell women, sisters Penny Letner and Kathy Parker, say that a drunken Hubert Muncey Jr. visited them in 1985, telling them tearfully that he had struck and killed his wife in a moment of anger.

Letner says she kept silent until she was contacted by House's lawyers in 1997 because she was afraid to get involved. Parker says she tried to tell local law enforcement officials at the time but was brushed off.

Parker, now 48, said she believes House is innocent and should not be executed. "We got one innocent death. We don't need two," she said in an interview.

Put it all together, House's supporters say, and there is more than enough reasonable doubt. "Their case was crap without the blood," said Steven Kissinger, House's lawyer. "It has to be so totally reliable to ignore everything else."

Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, based in Cincinnati, agreed. In his view, the refutation of the semen evidence destroyed the state's entire theory of the crime.

Last year, he wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by five colleagues, in which he called the House case "the rare or extraordinary case in which the petitioner through newly discovered evidence has established his actual innocence of both the death sentence and the underlying homicide." A seventh dissenter, Judge Ronald Lee Gilman, called the case an "authentic who-done-it," and called for a new trial.

But an eight-member majority of the appeals court upheld the conviction, reflecting the potential problems House may face at the Supreme Court.

Even though Blake, the state assistant medical examiner who testified for House, theorized that the blood could have been spilled or planted on his jeans, an investigator apparently saw blood on the jeans before they were sent to the FBI.

Three experts consulted for this story -- Brian Wraxall, chief forensic serologist of the Serological Research Institute in Richmond, Calif.; Moses Schanfield, chairman of the forensic sciences department at George Washington University; and Ronald L. Singer, the chief criminalist at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office in Fort Worth -- said that Blake could not have reached reliable conclusions from the evidence he had, and that his analysis was probably incorrect.

At a hearing in 1999, U.S. District Judge James H. Jarvis listened to Blake's testimony, as well as that of blood experts called by the state -- and discounted Blake's version. He also dismissed Letner's and Parker's testimony, noting that "this court is not impressed with the allegations of individuals who wait over ten years to come forward with their evidence." If Hubert Muncey Jr. had really struck his wife and killed her that night, the judge concluded, there would have been some sign of that in the house.

At the hearing, House, in his first sworn account of his whereabouts on the night of the crime, said he had been out for a walk when he was attacked by some men who drove by in a pickup truck and fled from them through the woods. The judge declared House "not a credible witness."

Given that the other elements of the state's case were still valid, Jarvis ruled, the DNA evidence was of secondary importance. Even without evidence of rape, House could have qualified for the death penalty under Tennessee law because he was guilty of a prior violent felony and the jury found the homicide especially brutal.

In upholding House's conviction and sentence in 2004, the 6th Circuit majority ruled that they had to defer to Jarvis's findings. "Despite his best efforts, the case against House remains strong," Judge Alan E. Norris wrote for the majority.

Opinions are divided in and around Luttrell, too, where people still follow the case and many know about House's DNA claims. "It's real plain," said Alvin Merritt, a businessman whose office stands across the road from the spot where Muncey's body was found. "They ought to go ahead and execute him."

But Mary Ann Collins, a former Luttrell resident who now works for the local newspaper in nearby Maynardville, said that the blood spillage "is suspicious to me. And that DNA is not his."

Muncey denies any involvement in the murder. His slain wife's photo adorns the living-room wall in his new house. According to his current wife, Joann, Muncey is now a church-going man and has been sober for 11 years.

In an interview, Muncey admitted that he once "slapped her just a little when she called me a son of a bitch," but that Carolyn Muncey "was a sweet person" whom he loved. The witnesses who say he confessed are lying, he said.

House, now 44, is suffering from multiple sclerosis and spends much of his time in a prison infirmary.

Phillips, the prosecutor who put House there, concedes that the Supreme Court's willingness to look into House's case after lower courts ruled against him does not bode well for the state. "You'd have to say we might well have to retry this case," he said.