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Court denies appeal of Waco man on death row
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals has declined to consider a 2nd
appeal by death row inmate
Gerald Wayne Tigner, moving the former Waco
man closer to his scheduled
March 7 execution.
Tigner now takes his appeal
to the U.S. Supreme Court in hopes that the
justices will block his
execution.
Tigner twice was convicted
and sentenced to die in the August 1993
shooting deaths of 2
men in Waco. He confessed to the slayings, which
prosecutors say resulted
from a drug-related robbery attempt. Tigner has
claimed he acted in self-defense.
However, in a letter to the
Tribune-Herald dated
Jan. 11, Tigner claims he didn't kill the men.
"The confessions the Waco
prosecutors have on me are false because I
never admitted I was
at the crime scene," Tigner wrote. "I'm innocent of
this crime and I deserve
my freedom back."
Tigner was convicted of
shooting James Williams, 22, 7 times and Michael
Watkins, 32, 6 times
as they sat in a car on North 10th Street.
Tigner's attorneys recently
submitted a sworn statement from prison
inmate Melvin Donnell
Swinnie that claims that Guan Scott, not Tigner,
killed the men. Scott
was shot and killed outside a Waco bar in December
1993.
The Texas Court of Criminal
Appeals dismissed the new evidence, as did
the 5th Circuit in New
Orleans this week.
Tigner was 1st tried and
convicted in 1994. He was retried in 1997 after
the Court of Criminal
Appeals reversed his 1st conviction and death
sentence because prosecutors
failed to provide defense attorneys with an
audiotape of Tigner's
confession in the time prescribed by law.
"We are glad to see that
he is 1 step closer in the process to the just
and correct sentence
that the jury imposed on him," McLennan County
prosecutor Crawford Long
said.
(source: Waco Tribune-Herald)
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