Did he kill her? Doubts, denial and a death penalty case

17 October 2004
Dwight Lewis
Tennessean columnist, regional editor and member of the editorial board

It was a question I had to ask the bearded man:

"Did you kill Carolyn Muncey?"

"No," answered Paul Gregory House. "Never even thought about it. Had no reason to. She was a nice person."

Then I asked him: "You've been locked up since July 1985. How does it feel being incarcerated for a crime that you and some others say you didn't commit?"

"It really doesn't feel good," House, a 42-year-old state death row inmate replied. "It makes me quite angry, in fact."

I had taken a trip to the state's Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in west Nashville Wednesday to interview the condemned prisoner who was convicted in 1986 of murdering Carolyn Muncey, a wife and mother, in Union County.

Before Wednesday, I had never met House but wrote a column in this space last Sunday saying he was still on death row despite the fact that six of the 15 judges on the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals said House is not guilty of Carolyn Muncey's murder and should be freed immediately. A seventh judge on the court of appeals said in a dissenting opinion that House should at least have a new trial.

"I would like to be set free, but I would accept a new trial," House told me as he sat in a wheelchair in a visiting room in Riverbend's infirmary. House suffers from multiple sclerosis and cannot walk on his own. His attorney, federal public defender Stephen M. Kissinger of Knoxville, has said he is afraid House won't live long enough to see his case appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"They have found so much stuff over the years that makes you wonder what are all those Republicans on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals thinking about," House added. He was referring to the fact that the eight judges on the Sixth Circuit who voted to uphold his death penalty were all appointed by Republican presidents.

Since House's conviction in 1986 for Muncey's 1985 murder, which he was accused of committing during an attempted rape, DNA has shown that the semen evidence used to help convict House was really that of her husband, Hubert Muncey. The physical evidence of blood tying House to Carolyn Muncey's murder has also been rebutted.

"It's been like hell," House said, referring to his almost 20 years in Tennessee's prison system.

As I sat talking to House, I couldn't help but think about another death row case on which I had reported back in 1978. It was the case of inmate Richard Austin. Then-Tennessean editor John Seigenthaler had gotten word that Austin, a professional pool shark out of Memphis, might not be guilty of the heinous crime of hiring a "hit man" to murder a police informant. As a result, Seigenthaler asked me and the late Tennessean reporter Nat Caldwell to look into the case.

Upon doing so, we discovered that Austin's lawyer, Robert I. Livingston, despite his client's claim of innocence, refused to call the actual trigger man, Jack Charles Blankenship, as a witness during Austin's trial.

In an interview in July 1978, Blankenship told Caldwell and me that he told Livingston before the trial that Austin was not in any way involved in the murder.

Blankenship was allowed by prosecutors in the case to plead guilty to the murder of Julian Watkins, in which he was hired for $1,000. He was sentenced to life.

In 1997, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Austin's original sentence and ordered that he receive a new trial. A second jury imposed the death sentence once again and Austin, now 65, remains on Tennessee's death row.

Why can't Paul Gregory House at least get a new trial in light of the new evidence showing that he did not murder Carolyn Muncey? Surely, state officials wouldn't want to see any innocent man executed.

"The new evidence discloses that Mr. Muncey, with a flood of tears, confessed to two women friends after the murder that he had killed his wife," U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Gilbert Merritt of Nashville wrote in a dissenting opinion in House's appeals case. "He told a third woman that he was going to 'get rid' of Carolyn a few weeks before the murder.

"He asked a fourth woman to provide him with an alibi on the night of the murder and gave testimony about his whereabouts that night at the time of the murder that has now been contradicted by a local law enforcement officer. The state offered no evidence that any of these witnesses was biased in favor of House or prejudiced against Mr. Muncey."

Merritt later added in his opinion: "The case comes down to the question of whether the newly discovered evidence undermining the case against House and incriminating Mr. Muncey is sufficiently strong — despite the uncertainties that remain — to preclude a rational juror from finding guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and to make the execution of House 'constitutionally intolerable.'"

"Mr. House, let me ask you again, did you kill Carolyn Muncey?" I said.

"No, I did not," he answered Wednesday. "I am just a poor, innocent man sitting on death row."