Derrick Jackson became the 15^th person the State of Texas has put to death this year. He was convicted for the September 1988 double murder of Forrest Henderson and Alan Wortenberry who were tenors with the Grand Houston Opera. The case became known as the “Opera Murders.” The murders were brutal: Henderson was stabbed and bludgeoned to death with an iron pipe while Wortenberry, who was Henderson’s house guest at his Gateway Plaza-area apartment, had his throat slashed.

            The murders remained unsolved for seven years. The only evidence left at the scene by the killer was a bloody handprint on the apartment’s doorknob. Jackson was linked to the crime in April 1995. He had been convicted and sentenced to 12 years for an armed robbery. Harris County law enforcement in 1995 had access to a new computer system that linked Jackson to the bloody handprint found at the Henderson/Wortenberry crime scene based on his 1995 fingerprints.

            Three years later a Harris County jury found Jackson guilty of the murders and sentenced him to death. Twelve years later Jackson was escorted into the Texas death chamber, and without saying a word or even acknowledging his own family members, he was put to death on the evening of July 20, 2010.

            This execution, I believe, should not have taken place for two reasons. First, Jackson maintained his innocence from the very beginning. And there were serious problems inherent in the way Jackson was convicted. In a 2007 report that heavily criticized the Houston Police Department’s troubled crime lab, Michael Bromwich, an independent investigator hired by former Mayor Bill White to review the crime lab’s operations, found that a technician had manipulated blood evidence to bolster homicide detectives’ case against another “prime” suspect at the time. That suspect had Type O blood while the bloody handprint found at the Henderson/Wortenberry crime scene was Type B blood. It was only after Jackson was arrested that the crime lab report was changed to reflect the Type B blood.

            During a death row interview with the Houston Chronicle several days before his execution, Jackson pointed to the botched blood evidence (as well as a number of mistakes by his defense attorneys) as the cause for his death sentence. “I don’t stay up at night and have nightmares,” Jackson told Chronicle reporter Allan Turner. “I had the fact that I’m being blamed and will be killed, but it’s more sadness than hate. Oh, life’s a bitch … It’s obvious I’m getting framed. I’m not your bad guy. People who know me know I’m a good guy.”

            But police and prosecutors paint a different picture of Jackson. They portrayed him as a predator who, as the Chronicle reported, “preyed on patrons of Montrose gay bars.”

            That brings me to the second reason why Jackson should not have been executed. Henderson reportedly met Jackson in a Montrose gay bar on the night of the murders and took the man home with him. Obviously, the “gay tenor” lived a risky life style. That by no means justified his horrible murder, but it was Henderson’s risky life style choice that caused the death of Alan Wortenberry who was recently divorced and living with Henderson as a “house guest” until he could get his life in order. Whether it was Jackson or someone else, Henderson brought a killer back to his apartment, ostensibly for a sexual encounter. Wortenberry had nothing to do with that choice. He was simply at the apartment when Henderson returned with the killer that robbed both men and brutally took their lives.

            Carl Wortenberry, Alan’s father, is a retired library director for Fort Worth. He attended Jackson’s execution. “When you come to the personal aspect of it,” he told the Chronicle before the Jackson’s execution, “pure logic says for someone to do a crime of this nature, unprovoked—Alan was in the wrong place at the wrong time—it’s hard for me to think the death penalty is unjustified.”

            But that’s part of the problem I have about Jackson’s execution. It was Wortenberry murder, a second killing, that made it a capital offense. A jury probably would not have returned a death penalty had Jackson simply killed Henderson. These kinds of cases rarely ever result in a death penalty verdict.

            And who is really responsible for Alan Wortenberry’s murder? The killer to begin with, but the killer would not have been in Henderson’s apartment had the gay opera tenor not made a risky life style choice to pick up a stranger and return home with him for sex. The killer had no premeditated intent to kill Alan Wortenberry. As his father pointed out, Alan was tragically in the wrong place at the wrong time. He died not because the killer went to the apartment intending to kill him but because Henderson, a friend, made horribly misguided decision to invite the killer in.

            The “Grand Opera Murder case” was a problem from the beginning. One gets the feeling that a lot of people simply wanted Jackson done away with so the case could finally be put to rest. If that is truly the case, then those people got what they wanted.