Dead Wrong

Authorities had accused the burly 23-year-old of kidnapping, raping and murdering a young woman, and he would face execution if convicted. Yet on this bleak, blustery morning in February 1986, House calmly and confidently comforted his mother, telling her that a jury would never convict an innocent man.

Unable to observe the majority of her son’s trial because she was to testify as a witness, Joyce House spent the next four days pacing the cold tile corridor outside the courtroom. While she was waiting, a Union County sheriff’s deputy approached her in the hallway and said that even he was skeptical they had the right suspect. He told her that he expected an acquittal.

When the jury announced it had reached a decision, Joyce found a seat on a long bench in the wood-paneled courtroom packed with curious onlookers. With his freedom and his life in jeopardy, the defendant was undoubtedly nervous, despite his confidence and unwavering claim of innocence. The next few agonizing minutes dragged on until finally the jury foreman stood to read the verdict: guilty.

Joyce was stunned and unable to move, while her son, once so full of hope, couldn’t believe the jury’s words.

“Paul was devastated,” she recalls now. “When I went back to see him, he was in shock and he said, ‘Evidently, the justice system doesn’t work, does it mom?’ ”

The very next morning—just hours before the jury was to impose a sentence—House attempted suicide, slashing his wrists with the blade from a disposable razor. After paramedics rushed House by helicopter to a hospital in nearby Knoxville, corrections officers found a handwritten letter in his jail cell professing his innocence.

Within a few hours of trying to kill himself, House was stitched and bandaged, and then transported to the courthouse to learn his fate. Once again his mother took the stand, this time reading for the jury the note her son had written proclaiming he was innocent. After deliberating for two hours, the jury sentenced House to be executed for the rape and murder of Carolyn Muncey.

Years after the trial, DNA testing proved House did not rape Muncey, and that the semen found on her nightgown belonged to her husband. Experts also concluded the blood on House’s blue jeans did not come directly from the victim at the crime scene, but instead spilled from vials of blood taken during the autopsy. In addition, several witnesses who did not testify at trial claimed the victim’s husband confessed to killing his wife.

Despite these revelations, House remains in prison, where in 2001 he was diagnosed with chronic multiple sclerosis. The 46-year-old inmate cannot walk (he uses a wheelchair), bathe or even feed himself without assistance, and yet the state continues to maintain he is a flight risk and a danger to society.

Then finally, in 2006, it seemed justice might finally prevail when the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the case and declared “no reasonable juror” would convict House given the evidence now available. Never before had the nation’s highest court gone so far in declaring an inmate was likely innocent.

In the wake of the unprecedented Supreme Court ruling, the case was sent back to federal court, where it lingered until December 2007 when a judge declared House’s conviction unconstitutional and ordered the state to either retry him or release him within 180 days.

Again, it appeared House was on the verge of vindication.

But rather than acknowledge defeat—never mind admitting error—the very same prosecutor who tried House for capital murder 23 years ago announced he was going to take one more shot at convicting the ailing man for murder. But this time around, he’d have to come up with a different motive for the crime, given that the theory he argued the first time around—that House killed Muncey to cover up rape—had been shredded by the emergence of scientific evidence.

Over the years, the plight of Paul House, and the state’s continued prosecution of him, has prompted outright disbelief. CNN and The Washington Post have reported on this otherwise unremarkable Tennessee defendant, while the late Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes interviewed House several years ago before traveling to Luttrell, Tenn., to uncover details about the murder. Closer to home, one of the most distinguished judges in Nashville can’t believe that House remains in prison.

“This is the first time in our history, so far as I know, that it has ever happened that the Supreme Court has made such a ruling and the state has gone forward to prosecute the guy anyways,” U.S. Circuit Judge Gilbert S. Merritt tells the Scene. The Nashville-based judge sits on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has reviewed the convoluted case several times over the years, as recently as last week. “Why, after all this evidence has poured in that House is innocent of the crime, does the state continue to so zealously defend the situation? The reason is because state prosecutors typically never admit error.”