Several people on Tennessee's death row are very close to exhausting all their appeals and facing impending execution. Two particular capital cases –- those of Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman and Paul Gregory House –- raise specific concerns that could be addressed by the implementation of procedural reforms to the criminal justice system that reduce the risk of wrongful convictions and death sentences. The Tennessee Justice Project works to advance systemic reform by promoting individual cases and supporting litigation efforts in the following cases:

• Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman
  In 1987, a Nashville jury convicted Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman in a stabbing death during an armed robbery and sentenced him to death. Every state and federal court that has reviewed Abdur'Rahman's claims of ineffective assistance of counsel has acknowledged that his attorneys' performance was legally inadequate. Had Abdur'Rahman's trial attorneys been effective, the jury would have had the opportunity to hear abundant evidence of extensive childhood abuse and neglect and a well-documented history of Abdur'Rahman's subsequent mental illness. Effective counsel would also have responded to the prosecutor's misrepresentations and even misconduct at trial, all of went unchallenged.
  
  At trial, Abdur'Rahman's lawyers presented no evidence, called no witnesses, and had no theory of defense in the guilt stage of the trial. At the sentencing stage, his lawyers only called the mentally disturbed Abdur'Rahman and his wife to testify, neither of whom had received any advance notice or preparation.
  
  Currently, Abdur'Rahman remains under sentence of death in Tennessee and imminently close to execution, though it is unclear whether Abdur'Rahman or his co-defendant was responsible for the death of the victim. Further, no court has ever reviewed the bulk of Abdur'Rahman's claims of prosecutorial misconduct, the Tennessee Supreme Court has never reviewed his claims of ineffective assistance of counsel or his claims of prosecutorial misconduct, and every state and federal court that has reviewed Abdur'Rahman's claims of ineffective assistance of counsel has acknowledged that Abdur'Rahman's attorneys were constitutionally deficient in their performance at trial.
  
  Read more about Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman's case.

• Paul House
  Paul House was convicted in Union County, Tennessee of the murder of Carolyn Muncey in 1985, and was placed on death row. House has always maintained his innocence, yet a thorough investigation of the case on his behalf was not conducted until after the case had already been through the trial, appeal, and state post-conviction proceedings.

  Attorneys for House are seeking his release from Tennessee's death row based upon newly discovered evidence. The prosecution's theory at trial was that House murdered Mrs. Muncey after raping her. The new evidence, which was discovered years after House's trial, casts strong doubts on the state's theory. First, two witnesses have testified that Mrs. Muncey's husband confessed to accidentally killing her when he hit her with what he intended to be a non-lethal blow. Additionally, DNA evidence found on the victim's clothes was shown to belong to her husband and not House. Other new evidence calls Mr. Muncey's alibi into question and discredits the evidence and testimony used against House at the time of trial.

  In an opinion issued in June, 2006 in the case of House v. Bell, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5-3 that Tennessee death row inmate Paul House is entitled to a new hearing in federal court because post-conviction DNA testing invalidated the prosecution's theory that he raped and then murdered a woman. The Court's opinion (pdf), authored by Justice Kennedy, affirmed that if the full body of evidence in the case, including DNA evidence, had been presented at trial, it is probable that no reasonable juror would have found House guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The case marks the first time that the Supreme Court has looked at the standards for reopening death penalty cases since DNA testing became widely available.

  Paul House remains on Tennessee's death row. Read more (pdf) about his case.