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A Texas death row inmate who has always maintained his innocence and claims that his conviction was based on junk food is about to be executed for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a student in the suburbs of Houston more than 20 years ago.
Larry Swearingen, 48, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday night for the murder of Melissa Trotter in December 1998. The 19-year-old was last seen leaving her community college in Conroe. His body was found nearly a month later in a forest near Huntsville, about 110 km north of Houston.
Prosecutors claimed that they were standing behind the "mountain of evidence" used to convict Swearingen in 2000. They described him as a sociopath with a criminal record of violence against women and men. tried to convince another inmate sentenced to death to acknowledge his crime.
Swearingen 's long – standing appeal lawyer, James Rytting, said he would ask the US Supreme Court to suspend enforcement, saying the lower courts "do not have to do anything about it. have not taken into account the considerable amount of evidence of innocence ". Swearingen, which is also represented by the Innocence project, has already benefited from five stays of execution.
The Courts of Appeal and the Texas Board of Pardons and Lyrics have refused to interrupt the execution. If that happens, Swearingen would be the twelfth inmate killed this year in the United States and the fourth in Texas.
Kelly Blackburn, head of the Montgomery County Attorney's Office, who sued Swearingen, said Swearingen's attempts to discredit the evidence had been in vain because "the opinions of its experts do not hold water".
"I have absolutely no doubt that anyone, with the exception of Larry Swearingen, killed … Melissa Trotter," said Blackburn.
During an interview in 2011, Swearingen told the Associated Press that he was tired of being "demonized" for a crime that he had not not committed.
"We would all like to know who did it," he said.
Blackburn said that Swearingen had killed Trotter because he was angry that she had held an appointment. At the time of Trotter's murder, Swearingen was under indictment for the abduction of a former fiancée.
Swearingen has long tried to question the evidence used to convict him, particularly the claims of prosecution experts that Trotter's body was in the woods for 25 days. Rytting stated that at least five defense experts had concluded that his body had remained there for 14 days at most and that Swearingen had already been arrested by that date, he could not have left his body here.
Rytting argues that a piece of pantyhose used to throttle Trotter does not match a piece found in the Swearingen caravan. He also challenges the claims of prosecution experts who rejected the blood found in Trotter's nail chips, claiming that the blood, which was determined not to belong to Swearingen, supported the theory of defense that someone else had killed her.
In letters to Swearingen's lawyers in July and August, the Texas Department of Public Safety said its technicians should not have been so eloquent in their testimony about the blood found in nails and pantyhose .
The US 5th Federal Court of Appeal dismissed Swearingen's challenge over evidence of blood and pantyhose correspondence, citing the "mountain of evidence" that "seals Swearingen's guilt for the murder of Trotter" .
Blackburn said that Swearingen had tried to lie people in order to give him an alibi. After his arrest, Swearingen asked another inmate to write a letter written in Spanish by Swearingen who claimed to be the real killer and sent it to his lawyer. In 2017, Swearingen and another man sentenced to death, Anthony Shore, concocted a plan for Shore to be responsible for the murder of Trotter. Shore was executed last year.
Rytting said Swearingen was guilty of "doing very stupid things", but prosecutors do not have proof that he killed Trotter.
"Let's hope we get closer to a little more justice (Trotter's family) than the justice they've been waiting for for so long," Blackburn said.
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Lozano reported from Houston.
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Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70
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