Henry Watkins “Hank” Skinner is scheduled to be executed on March 24 in Texas for the New Year’s Eve 1993 murders of his girlfriend and her two grown sons. But Northwestern University Journalism School’s Medill Innocence Project contends there are enough holes in the Skinner case to ask for a postponement of his execution until DNA tests can be run on blood and other evidence collected at the scene of the crimes.

Skinner was in the Pampa, Texas, house where Twila Busby and her children were found bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Skinner contends he was unconscious at the time of the murders after consuming vodka and codeine. His conviction rested largely on the facts that he was present at the crime scene, had small spots of blood from two of the three victims on his shirt, and his neighbor and ex-girlfriend, Andrea Reed, testified that he admitted his guilt to her.

Reed recanted her testimony in 1997, later telling the Medill Innocence Project she was pressured by police and prosecutors into fingering Skinner for the murders. Furthermore, DNA evidence lifted from the crime scene—including blood off the murder weapons, skin taken from under Busby’s fingernails and a rape test kit—have never been tested by a forensics laboratory.

Supporters of Skinner urge that a lab examine the DNA evidence before it’s too late. But Texas officials have refused to do so.

Chromosomal Laboratories in Phoenix, Arizona, has even offered to analyze the DNA for free.

-Noel Brinkerhoff