There is more. Although there was incriminating evidence against him at trial, Manning has always maintained his innocence. And jury selection during his 1994 trial -- wherein a black man was accused of murdering two white people in the Deep South -- was marked by the sort of racial attitudes over peremptory challenges that has since caused the United States Supreme Court, in Miller-El v. Dretke and Snyder v. Louisiana, to caution state lawyers about coming into appellate courts with "unreasonable" justifications for excluding black jurors from cases involving black defendants. Over and over again, Manning's prosecutors excluded black jurors from his trial, sometimes for no other reason than that they read "black" magazines.

Racial bias. A faulty confession. Untested scientific evidence. In these circumstances, one could reasonably argue that the "accuracy" of Manning's conviction and death sentence are in doubt. Even more rationally, one could argue that the state has at its disposal the relatively simple means to answer some of the most basic questions raised by the case -- test the evidence! But late last month, in a divided ruling, the Supreme Court of Mississippi declared that the time had come to end the debate over Manning's case and his cause. By a 5-4 vote, the justices rejected the defendant's attempt to test the evidence and for other relief.

So, despite serious questions about the credibility of the prosecution's most powerful witness, and without evaluating the scientific evidence that could supply a definitive answer, state officials plan to put Manning to death by lethal injection at 6 p.m. next Tuesday, May 7, at the state penitentiary in Sunflower County, Mississippi. He will be executed at ol' Parchman unless the Supreme Court in Washington, or the governor in Jackson, stops the execution and orders Mississippi officials, at a minimum, to undertake the testing that would help get to the truth of the matter.

The Scientific Evidence

The most important reason why the Manning case deserves a closer look before it is too late is the failure of state officials to use modern techniques to test DNA and fingerprints from the crime scene. Last month, in rejecting Manning's latest claims, the state supreme court's majority ruled that the defendant was not entitled to DNA testing because the absence of his DNA from the crime scene -- assuming the tests came back negative -- would not exonerate him given the other evidence introduced at trial.

That position, a form of which was argued by state lawyers in their briefs, is unsupported by common sense or Mississippi's history with DNA testing. Lawyers for the Mississippi Innocence Project, which as it often does has filed a brief urging DNA testing in this case, told the state justices late last week:

[O]f the seven people in Mississippi exonerated by DNA testing after being convicted and imprisoned. ... none were exonerated simply because their DNA was absent from the crime scene; they were exonerated because in each case the true perpetrator left their DNA at the crime scene. In six of those cases the true perpetrator was identified by the DNA testing and subsequent comparisons or DNA database searches, and in five cases the real perpetrator was charged with the crime after the wrongly convicted persons were exonerated.

That is what is at stake here; no more, no less. By testing the DNA evidence still available, Mississippi could achieve two goals at the same time -- resolving Manning's claims and, if those claims are valid, finding a person responsible for the crime. The state's justices may be in no mood to listen to the Innocence Project, but if they are they will hear something insightful about the way these cases unfold. "Simply put," the Innocence Project argued this week, "just because it's hard to imagine a scenario where DNA testing could exonerate Willie Manning doesn't mean there isn't one."