In the wake of a scandal that has called into question the reliability of the police crime lab’s testing and handling of evidence in Harris County, Texas, Police Chief Harold Hurtt has said that executions of inmates from the county should not be scheduled until all relevant evidence has been reexamined to assure accuracy. He went on to note that the executions of nine individuals convicted in Harris County that are scheduled to take place before March 2005 should not be allowed to go forward. “I think it would be very prudent for us as a criminal justice system to delay further executions until we have had time to review the evidence,” Hurtt said. Harris County investigators are about a quarter of the way through their review of hundreds of boxes of evidence that had been forgotten in a storage room and may impact thousands of crimnal cases. (Houston Chronicle, September 30, 2004). See Innocence.

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