Texas man who raped and murdered college student 20 years ago set to be executed today
Larry Swearingen, a death row inmate in Texas, is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday evening, August 21, for the abduction, rape, and murder of a Houston college student over 20 years ago.
The man, 48, will receive a lethal injection later today for killing 19-year-old Melissa Trotter in December 1998.
Trotter was last seen leaving her community college in Conroe, and her body was eventually found almost a month later in a forest near Huntsville, nearly 70 miles north of her college.
Swearingen, who is represented by the Innocent Project, has always maintained his innocence, claiming that his conviction was based on junk science.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have described the accused as a sociopath with a criminal history of violence against women. They have also accused Swearingen of attempting to get a fellow death row inmate to take credit for his crime.
Swearingen's attorney, James Rytting, reportedly said that he would ask the US Supreme Court to halt his client's execution, arguing that the lower courts "have failed to take into account the considerable amount of evidence of innocence."
The 48-year-old has reportedly received five stays of execution previously.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Appeals courts, however, have declined to cease his execution this time.
If Swearingen is given the lethal injection tonight, he would be the 12th inmate to put to death this year and the fourth in Texas.
The trial bureau chief for the Montgomery County District Attorney's Office, Kelly Blackburn, said that the accused's efforts to discredit the evidence against him have been unsuccessful because "his experts' opinions don't hold water. I have absolutely zero doubt that anybody but Larry Swearingen killed ... Melissa Trotter," the Daily Mail reported.
Swearingen, in an interview with The Associated Press in 2011, had said that he was tired of being "demonized" for a crime he did not commit: "we'd all like to know who done it."
According to Blackburn, Swearingen killed Trotter because he was angry that she had stood him up for a date.
Swearingen, at the time of Trotter's killing, was under indictment for kidnapping a former fiancee.
The accused has always been doubtful of the evidence presented by the prosecution experts that Trotter's body had been in the woods for 25 days, however, Rytting said that at least five defense experts have concluded that her body was not there for over 14 days, and considering Swearingen had already been arrested by then, he could not have been behind the crime.
Swearingen's lawyer also said that a piece of pantyhose used to strangle the victim was not a match to a piece found in Swearingen's trailer and has disputed prosecution experts' claims dismissing blood found in rotter's fingernail shavings, stating that the blood was determined to not be of Swearingen's which backs his theory that someone else murdered the 19-year-old.