Supreme Court confronts conflicting laws on post-conviction DNA testing

James Woodard sits with Carolyn Hodo at a coffee shop in Dallas. Woodard was exonerated and released from prison after 27 years with the help of DNA testing that proved he was wrongfully convicted of killing his girlfriend. (For The Washington Post)

The unit he set up investigates the requests. But more important, he said, his prosecutors have begun to believe that part of their job is to aid those claiming innocence.

"When we free a person who didn't commit a crime, that's the work of a prosecutor," Watkins said. "A prosecutor's job is not just about convictions; it's about justice."

Watkins's initiatives have brought him national exposure but not a lot of friends among his fellow prosecutors. One particularly sharp critic is John Bradley, the district attorney in Williamson County, near Austin.

Bradley accused Watkins of securing a place on "the national stage" by implying that he is "the only prosecutor in Texas or anywhere else who is doing this."

The emphasis on exonerations obscures how few there are in a place such as Texas, Bradley said, where as many as 1 million people are convicted of crimes each year.

"What I object to is taking a few incidents and using them to try to make it seem like the justice system is broken," he said.

Bradley said the Texas law allows for DNA testing when it is appropriate. But many requests for testing, he said, are just the guilty "playing DNA lottery" and hoping for an outcome that might cast doubt on their convictions.

A Catch-22

With the issue now before the Supreme Court, some prisoner advocates say privately that they would have wished for a better test case than Skinner's.

He has maintained his innocence, despite acknowledging that he was present during the 1993 New Year's Eve slayings of his girlfriend Twila Busby and her two mentally disabled adult sons at the house they shared in the small Panhandle town of Pampa. Police found Skinner blocks away, hiding in the closet of a former girlfriend, in bloody clothes and with a gash in his hand.

He said that during the killings he was passed out on what tests showed to be a near-lethal combination of codeine and alcohol. He said he could not have overpowered and killed the three in his condition.

He said that he woke to find them dead and that the blood on his clothes came from examining them.

Prosecutors did not test all of the evidence from the crime scene, including material from a rape kit, hair, and skin cells under Busby's fingernails.