Larry Swearingen Executed, Says "Lord forgive them. They don't know what they are doing."

[James_Madison_Lives]

Blood under victim's fingernails did not match Swearingen

State fought DNA tests

Friends of victim say she had expressed fear of someone else, not Swearingen


https://www.andrewpurcell.net/?p=1609


The Innocence Project, an organisation that seeks to overturn wrongful convictions in capital cases, put me in touch with James Rytting, a veteran defence lawyer in Texas. He assured me that in the case of Larry Swearingen, the state had got the wrong man, and forensic science could prove it.

[James_Madison_Lives]

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In February, nine forensic experts took the stand at an evidentiary hearing for convicted murderer Larry Swearingen to explain that precisely because of this decomposition science, they were sure that Trotter hadn’t been dead very long when her body was discovered— as little as a day; as long as 14. Either way, Swearingen couldn’t have killed her, they said, because at the time of her death he was in jail.

Swearingen’s attorney, James Rytting, says the pair of panties were the prosecution’s supposed smoking gun. But the problem with the evidence was that the forensics team searched his trailer—and the trailer park—twice before Trotter’s body was discovered and the investigators found nothing. The dumpster where the panties were eventually found could have been emptied several times in the interim. “This wasn’t just one cop,” he says. “It was a team of investigators. Then after they find her body they find the [other part of the panties]. It’s a recipe for planting evidence or a bloody invitation for the person who really killed this girl to set Larry up.”

Most compelling of all, DNA testing of pubic hairs found on Trotter’s vagina as well as blood under her fingernails showed that neither belonged to Swearingen. “They took evidence of a friendship and morphed it into murder,” he says.

https://www.texasobserver.org/is-larry-swearingen-innocent/