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American Hank Skinner died on February 16 at a Galveston, Texas hospital at the age of 60, after spending 3 decades on death row. Convicted of a triple murder committed in 1993, Skinner never stopped claiming his innocence and five times he escaped execution. On September 13, 2023, he was scheduled to be executed.
Hank Skinner died of “natural causes,” Texas state prison spokesman Robert Hurst said, quoted by the Associated Press agency.
According to a statement from his lawyersHenry W. “Hank” Skinner died on February 16 at a hospital in Galveston (Texas) due to complications derived from surgery performed in December 2022 to remove a brain tumor.
His case had a special resonance in France, since he was married to the French Sandrine Ageorge-Skinner. She married Hank Skinner in 2008, after corresponding with him since 1996. Her wife is a figure for the abolition of the death penalty and she fought tirelessly to get her husband released .
Skinner escaped execution in 2010, in extremis, 20 minutes before lethal injection, by a decision of the Texas Court of Appeals, the state where he was incarcerated, authorizing DNA testing. However, this evidence was not enough to exonerate him and he was scheduled to be executed on September 13, 2023.
Attorneys for Henry “Hank” Skinner have released a statement about his death this morning from complications following surgery in December. Skinner spent more than 27 years on death row for a crime he staunchly maintained he did not commit. https://t.co/s6ajEy5Js5
—TCADP (@TCADPdotORG) February 16, 2023
“I don’t want to end my days here”
He was sentenced to death in 1995 for the triple murder, on December 31, 1993, of his then girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two children. Skinner never denied being in the house where the three died, but claimed that he was unconscious after taking alcohol and codeine (a substance found naturally in opium).
Skinner managed to have additional DNA tests done after 13 years of legal proceedings and being saved in extremis to die, just 20 minutes before the planned execution. However, later, another court rejected the evidence, considering that “they were not favorable to the defendant”.
Hank Skinner, on the other hand, saw these DNA tests as “irrefutable proof” of his innocence, according to statements he made to AFP in 2014.
Since 2015 Skinner was in the West Livingston Polunksy Penitentiary Unit, in Livingston, a town about 130 kilometers north of Houston, Texas.
Last year, he had declared from the prison where he was held: “I am optimistic that I am not going to end up here. They never should have put me here to begin with.”
His story has inspired the media and the world of cinema. Hank Skinner was the protagonist of an episode of the program “Death Row Stories”. Film director Jordan Feldman also recounted his struggle in the documentary “A Moment in the Life of Hank Skinner”.
#FlashSpecial #HankSkinner — Nous avons la tristesse d’annoncer le décès de nuestra client et ami, Henry W. “Hank” Skinner, qui s’est éteint le jeudi 16 fevrier. Click here:https://t.co/znc2PARUdz via @justice4hank pic.twitter.com/G3UAdmwUnq
— Justice4Hank (@Justice4Hank) February 17, 2023
