Hank Skinner has been on death row in Texas for almost three decades, but he doesn’t lose hope. “I am optimistic that I will not end up here. I shouldn’t be here at all,” he told AFP.

He is being held at Allan B. Polunsky Prison in Livingston, 130 km north of Houston, and has always pleaded not guilty. In 1995, Skinner was sentenced to death for the murder of his girlfriend and her two children in Pampa, near Texas.

Skinner’s execution has already been planned five times — Photo: Disclosure/O Trentino/ND

He says he was not at the house where the three victims died and that he passed out after mixing drugs and alcohol. Skinner is detained in a nearby house with bloody clothes and insists that DNA evidence will prove his innocence.

The 60-year-old has spent almost half of his life awaiting a ruling from the state’s top criminal court.

The Texas Court of Appeals will consider whether Skinner’s jury would decide differently if he had access to the DNA test available today.

Texas has 197 death row inmates. In 2020 and 2021, six were executed, but 11 were removed from the list after their sentences were reviewed.

Some remain behind bars. Others are free, like Cesar Fierro, who returned to Mexico after 40 years on death row.

If the court finds Skinner right, he will remain in prison, but he can appeal, trying to prove his innocence.

Five execution dates

Skinner’s execution has already been ordered five times.

In March 2010, he was pardoned 23 minutes before the lethal injection. This news was reported by his lawyer.

“I felt like a weight had been lifted from my chest. I felt light, I thought I’d float away.”

After the euphoria wore off, Skinner faced a terrible depression when he realized he would be returning to death row.

According to him, watching inmates die is more difficult than sitting in a small cell for 22-23 hours a day, without television and physical contact, except for dates of wives.

A total of 127 prisoners have been executed since 2010 in Texas, the state with the most death sentences. “Psychically unstable people live here. They throw themselves at walls, knock on doors, scream at the top of their lungs,” he says.

Others talk to imaginary people. There are also real conversations, always in high tones. “Noise all the time. But we learn to switch off,” Skinner admits.

He says that without daylight and with breakfast at 3 a.m., it’s hard to get an idea of ​​everyday life. We sleep when we are tired and take advantage of the silence of the night to read.

french wife

In 2008, Skinner married a French anti-death penalty activist who also believes he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

Skinner says that in the years since he left, he wished he could “spend every minute” with his wife.

He also has another project: “I will put an end to the death penalty throughout the world.”

“I believe that if people knew what it really is, they would never vote for the death penalty.”