UPDATED: Attorney General Greg Abbott is supporting a bill by state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, that would require DNA testing of "all biological evidence" in cases where prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

In an advisory filed in state district court on Wednesday, the Texas attorney general's office says DNA test results further confirm Hank Skinner's guilt. The death row inmate's lawyer says it's too early to draw conclusions.

Reversing its decade-long objection to testing that death row inmate Hank Skinner says could prove his innocence, the Texas Attorney General's office on Friday filed an advisory with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals seeking to test DNA in the case. 

The state's highest criminal court had tough questions today for state lawyers who have objected for more than a decade to DNA tests for death row inmate Hank Skinner. 

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals took some heat off of Gov. Rick Perry when it issued a stay of execution for Hank Skinner this week. And the governor has avoided any link to another case involving two of his appointees and a botched murder prosecution in Williamson County.

On this week's TribCast, Ross, Reeve, Brandi, and Jay review the latest criminal justice headlines, consider the difference between news and gossip in light of the latest Herman Cain developments, and explain what's going on with redistricting.

Facing a Wednesday execution date, convicted murderer Hank Skinner is again appealing to the state's highest criminal court to allow for new DNA tests he says could exonerate him. But the court previously has ruled against him — twice.

A Gray County District Court today denied DNA testing that death row inmate Hank Skinner has been seeking for a decade. Skinner's lawyers plan to appeal the decision. His execution is scheduled for Wednesday.

More than a dozen current and former lawmakers, prosecutors, judges, police officers and even a former Texas governor sent a letter today calling on Gov. Rick Perry to allow for DNA testing death row inmate Hank Skinner says could prove his innocence.

Following a hearing today in federal court in Amarillo, a lawyer for death row inmate Hank Skinner said it will likely be up to the state courts to decide a fight over DNA testing in his case. Skinner is scheduled to be executed Nov. 9.

For the fourth time, the state of Texas is scheduled to execute death row inmate Hank Skinner for the 1993 murders of his live-in girlfriend and her two sons, potentially quashing his ability to request DNA testing under a new state law.

Conversations about the coming Hispanic majority and the 82nd session from our New Day Rising symposium, M. Smith on the latest tort reform battle, Galbraith on greater scrutiny of the gas industry, Ramsey on whether lawmakers will cut their own pay and benefits, Ramshaw and Aguilar on what's holding up abortion sonogram legislation, Aguilar on the ag commissioner's controversial new website, Philpott on what $9.8 billion in public education cuts looks like, Hamilton on a snippy exchange of higher ed letters and Grissom on the latest court decision in the Hank Skinner case: The best of our best content from March 7 to 11, 2011.

Texas juries sentenced just eight people to death in 2010, the smallest number since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment here in 1976, according to a report published today by the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

The co-director of the University of Texas School of Law Capital Punishment Center, currently representing death row inmate Henry “Hank” Skinner before the U.S. Supreme Court, on what it's like to try a case in front of the high court, how Texas has influenced capital punishment law, why Texas juries are more inclined to impose the death penalty and the impact of life without parole.

Listen to the oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday in the Texas death penalty case of Hank Skinner.

More than 120 college students worked 12,300 hours-plus on Innocence Project of Texas cases from 2007 to 2009, according to the Task Force on Indigent Defense. As student participation has increased, so have exonerations.

Seven of the jurors who sent Hank Skinner to death row for the murders of his girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two sons now say they want the state to test all the DNA available in the case.