Cases: Jackie Elliot (USA)
British national Jackie Elliott was executed by lethal injection on 4 February 2003, in Hunstville, Texas, despite new evidence that he was innocent of the 1986 rape and murder for which he had received the death penalty. Jackie was born in Felixstowe, Suffolk in 1960 where his father was a serviceman at a nearby US air base.
Reprieve volunteers and Fellows worked tirelessly in the weeks before Jackie’s execution, interviewing witnesses and developing the evidence that questioned Jackie's culpability. This included an investigation of alternate suspects and requests for DNA testing. Reprieve worked with Amnesty International and a coalition of 150 UK MPs, church leaders, members of the House of Lords, the Law Society and the English Bar's Human Rights Committee in an attempt to save Jackie's life.
The Texas courts refused to allow DNA testing of critical physical evidence, despite a unanimous petition from the jurors who had sentenced Jackie to death requesting that his execution be stayed until such testing could be conducted. The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights issued precautionary measures, requesting the United States to prevent the execution in order to allow the Commission to rule on apparent breaches of human rights law in Jackie's case.
Despite all of this, Texas went ahead with Jackie’s execution.
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