whether you like it or not, tim is our client and if he dies, we will live with it. in the years that follow, the hennis case was the textbook case of wrongful prosecution. scott whisnant spoke about the case, and it was adapted into a tv movie. not everybody sitting in prison is guilty. north carolina now has a commission that actually has released a number of innocent people. despite all of the attention to hennis acquittal, the eastburn s murders would go unsolved for another 16 years until 20005 when scott whisnant spoke about the case at a criminology seminar, and he spoke at a seminar with larry spoke at a seminar with larry was in the audience. there were potentially other evidence out there. well, if he is innocent, who did it? the state of north carolina did
of the fingerprints, blood, semen found at the crime scene none of it linked to hennis. down here, we didn t have the equipment and the facilities that they have up north. we had no dna down here when this crime occurred. i would have liked to have had a fingerprint. he left a shoe or something that he dropped to tie him to it, but i thought that we had enough to justify the case in the trial. the trial began on may 27th, 1986. everybody wanted in that courtroom. the bailiffs a couple of times had to break up fistfights. the prosecutors called it the show. they wanted to emphasize how gruesome the murder was, so they built a screen that took up the whole wall, and they took the
i was so happy. i mean, i was walking on cloud nine. defense lawyer billy richardson was driving through mississippi when he heard the news. i said stop the car. it was just like somebody had taken a 2x4 and hit me upside of the head with it. i was convinced that if anybody could ever run an actual dna on that sample, they would find someone other than tim hennis, and i believed it with every fiber of my being. but the shocking dna results led to a pragmatic question. what do you do now? timothy hennis had been ajudeicated not guilty, and therefore, the south carolina was not going to try him again. we fought a revolutionary war because somebody could be tried over and over again for the same offense. and the founders put it in the constitution that there is no
evidence in front of the house they can t explain. they found a head hair in the bed that is not tim hennis and there is a pubic hair that is not tim s. there is male dna that is not tim s. and there is male dna under the daughter s fingernails that is not tim s. and nothing else came back to timothy hennis. underneath the fingernails is not his, but what is, is that vaginal swab. to me, the dna evidence of a woman who is raped is pretty damaging evidence. who is it? and the fingernail scrapings weren t enough for a full dna profile, so the defense asked to test all of the crime scene evidence that the might point to a different perpetrator including a blood-soaked towel. now, who had sex with her did not have necessarily kill her, but you can argue that whoever cleaned up the blood might have had something to do with it, but let s find out what happened. in the military if you need a test done, you have to ask the
in his eyes, he just said, them. on april 15th, 2010, the jury sentenced timothy hennis to death. but i feel vindicated for some of the things that you heard when you got a not guilty and the smiles and the smirks that you see from certain people, you damn right, i do, yes, sir, i do, i feel vindicated. tim hennis now sits in solitary confinement in fort leavenworth, kansas. his appeals in the military and federal courts could take decades. i still believe that tim is innocent, and i m not his lawyer right now, so it would be improper for me to sit down and say, did you or didn t you? i am dying to have that conversation with him, but how can you put a man to death based solely on one piece of evidence? our country was formed on the premise that one person wrongfully convicted is a grave injustice. now i don t know what the outcome of this is to be, but this is a good case.