High-profile scheduled execution raises distinct innocence claim

As detailed in this AP story, Texas is scheduled in two weeks to execute Cathy Henderson.  Her case, as detailed in the AP piece, raises a distinct type of innocent claim:

A neighbor in a suburban Austin neighborhood appeared to be the perfect babysitter for Eryn Baugh’s infant son and his 2-year-old sister.  “She’s the most sweet, endearing person in the world and put forward this good Christian front,” Baugh said of Cathy Lynn Henderson, who lived two blocks away. “She could sell snow to an Eskimo.”

But just weeks after Henderson started working for the Baughs, 3-month-old Brandon was dead and Henderson had fled the state.  The infant’s body was found buried 60 miles away with his skull crushed, wrapped in his yellow-trimmed white blanket and stuffed into a box that previously held Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers.

Henderson, 50, is set to die in less than three weeks for the 1994 slaying that made her one of the most hated women in Texas.  She would be just the 12th woman among the nearly 1,100 convicted killers executed since capital punishment resumed in the United States in 1977.

Henderson insists Brandon died in an accidental fall and that her decision to bury him and flee was made in panic, not in cold blood.  “It’s apparent I wasn’t thinking clearly,” Henderson told The Associated Press recently from the state’s female death row outside Gatesville.  “I think I was in shock, disbelief. I just didn’t know what I was doing. That baby was dead. I didn’t want to deal with that. There was too much sorrow. It hurt, it hurt,” she said, tearing up. “When I look back at it, it does kind of look like I was guilty, doesn’t it?”

Henderson’s case has been championed by Sister Helen Prejean of “Dead Man Walking” fame.  Supporters say new engineering data interpreting Brandon’s skull fracture could better support Henderson’s contention the child’s death was an accident and her life should be spared.

As noted before in this post (when Henderson faced an April execution date), Henderson’s gender, the involvement of Sister Helen Prejean, and her distinct claim of innocence all suggest this case will become very high-profile as her execution date approaches. 

Especially because this case is in Texas — which has already conducted 2/3 of all executions nationwide this year and has five executions scheduled for June — I will be following the Henderson case closely as a litmus test on the state of death penalty politics.  If support for the death penalty is really waning nationwide, Henderson might get another reprieve.  But, in Texas, the safe money is always on an execution going forward.