Legal Research

Long Wait Ends as Mother Prepares for Death Row Son to Come Home

By David Badertscher, PLL

Source: Crime and Justice News, May 14, 2008.

"Joyce House, mother of Tennessee death row inmate Paul Gregory House, is preparing her home for her son to come home, at long last. After he spent 20-plus years behind bars for a 1985 murder, Joyce House was expecting her son to come home when a U.S. Supreme Court decision said a jury should have heard testimony that might have exonerated him and after a U.S. district judge ordered him released pending a new trial. But she will have to wait a couple of more weeks, reports the Tennessean, which profiles the convict and his mother."

"As House prepares to go home, Union County District Attorney General William Paul Phillips says he is preparing to retry House. The courts have said the prosecutor has 180 days to begin. Paul House was convicted for the slaying of Carolyn Muncey, whose bludgeoned body was found down an embankment near her East Tennessee home. Paul House, who had moved to Tennessee from Utah after serving time in jail for aggravated sexual assault, became the prime suspect and was arrested. He was sentenced to death in 1986. Years later, the advent of DNA evidence revealed House did not rape Muncey. The semen found on her body belonged to her husband. Through all those years, his mother was his steadfast supporter".

Tennessean

Full post as published by New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library on May 14, 2008 (boomark / email).