Claude "Butch" Jones would seem an unlikely client for the Innocence Project, a legal foundation that has freed 254 men and women through DNA evidence since 1992. Jones was not, in the broadest sense, an innocent man. He was an alcoholic and an armed robber who once, while serving time in Kansas for murder, doused another inmate with lighter fluid and, in the words of his own defense attorney, "torched him."
When Jones was executed by the state of Texas, however, it wasn't just for being a criminal. It was for a specific crime: the 1989 murder of a liquor-store owner named Allen Hilzendager in a small town with a violent name — Point Blank, Texas. Jones and Danny Dixon, another paroled murderer, had driven to the liquor store in a pickup truck. One of the two men walked inside and shot Hilzendager three times, leaving him dead in a pool of blood and spilled alcohol.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1990809,00.html?xid=newsletter-daily#ixzz0omaIsp9y
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