Paul House, My Brother, and Me

It’s a damn shame most of y’all never got to meet Bill.

My youngest brother was like no one I’ve ever met. As a volunteer coach with our old high school football team, the head coach would later marvel, he was once tasked with a semester’s worth of work and was done in an afternoon. Bill could be shockingly insightful even in a family where only a Bachelor’s degree makes you something of a black sheep. After seeing the Bryan Stevenson biopic Just Mercy, however, he thought less—though still with incredible depth and complexity—about confronting the psychic toll of football, and more about rural poverty and incarceration. He graduated with honors in psychology from the University of Florida and accepted a full scholarship for a Master’s program at Florida State.

You’ve probably already guessed we’re not staying on this trajectory.

Somewhere around the end of high school, Bill’s vision started cutting in and out; he eventually went for an evaluation when it started to happen while he was driving. After some testing, Bill was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Essentially, his body’s macrophages (white blood cells tasked with surrounding and consuming foreign microorganisms) turned against the myelin sheath of his neurons (the part of a neuron that allows it to talk to another). The damage to his body and mind would be progressive and incurable, and though he seemed to handle it well through his college years, my parents were warned ahead of time that the leading cause of death for young people with MS was suicide. I’m hoping that’s as much as I have to say about how the story ends.

Bill is, in the long run, the reason this space exists, but you’re not here to hear me talk about him. I wasn’t familiar with Paul House, the wrongfully convicted Tennessee man who died free but irreparably harmed this week, until a stunning tribute by Radley Balko. I mention Bill at length so you understand just how well I know the pathophysiological rat bastard that killed House, and so his case underscores how badly the innocence discourse surrounding capital punishment, as necessary and well-meaning as it is, can miss the point.

Tennessee Defended Paul House’s Conviction Even when It Made No Sense

There may be no better case to demonstrate how far American prosecutors will go to defend a conviction than Paul House.

To be sure, House had done himself few favors when police arrested him for Carolyn Muncey’s murder. He’d pled guilty to sexual assault years before in Utah (which he maintained was to avoid the trial penalty), and he initially lied to police about scratches on his arms, attributing them to his girlfriend’s cats before conceding they were from the fistfights with locals he tended to get into. The other evidence, however, was scandalously thin: existing forensic evidence could only match a semen sample with a 29% cohort of men that included House, and a sample of Muncey’s blood on his jeans—which, at trial, was only matched to a blood type she shared with and 33% of the population—was later proven to have come from evidence mishandling. Nonetheless, House was convicted of her murder and sentenced to death.

Once inside the system, House experienced the difficult squeeze common to post-conviction litigation: it’s very difficult to get any of the few attorneys with experience in capital punishment’s unique, state-specific complexities, and federal law is required to defer to state courts on even minor mistakes by ineffective counsel or, like House, people representing themselves. Even after he got representation, Tennessee courts deferred to the trial court, and the prosecution kept stubbornly defending its increasingly shaky conviction. At trial, the prosecution’s closing argument included a long-winded screed alleging that House’s motive was sexual assault, based on a semen sample that might have matched House according to the science available at trial; when later and better science proved it didn’t, the prosecution straight-facedly argued it didn’t matter because they hadn’t accused him of rape. An appeals court agreed.

House’s last hope was an extremely narrow window created by the Supreme Court: new “freestanding“ evidence that established innocence could be introduced notwithstanding the case’s procedural history. As Balko notes, the standard is extremely high:

At the time, no one facing execution had ever been able to take advantage of this gateway in the ten years it had been open. In a 5-3 decision, SCOTUS made Paul House (v. Bell) the first.

Tennessee Left House’s MS to Ravage His Body on Death Row

As late as 2007, Tennessee was aware House had MS. Though it’s incurable, multiple sclerosis can be managed via corticosteroid injections (which tamp down the inflammation that causes lesions in the brain) and infusion therapy; as of 2023, available treatments had preserved mobility in nearly 80% of MS patients.

Instead, Tennessee let his MS rip through him. House’s mother first noticed something was wrong when her son moved around a visitation room by propping himself up against the wall and sliding to his destination; by the time he was free, his compatriots on death row were feeding, bathing, and carrying him everywhere. Untreated MS can cause as much as 1.5% of the brain matter loss per year; by the time he was free, House was left with little ability to carry out daily living. He was also suffering this on death row, a place with its own toll on brain anatomy; though the mechanism isn’t clearly known, social isolation is associated with increased pain severity and disability status in MS patients.

To the extent the state responded at all to his condition, it was with incredible cruelty: prison warden denied him a walker on the grounds that he might swing it at someone, and when the prosecutor’s office geared up to try him again following the SCOTUS decision, they requested he be held without bail, as the wheelchair-bound House was a “flight risk.” Since Tennessee’s exoneration laws require the governor to admit prosecutors got it wrong, he was also never compensated.

Paul House Shows How Death Row Exonerations Aren’t Enough

MS was still only warming up with Bill, so I know about the later stages of the disease only from stories like Paul’s. To be fair, there’s a lot we can’t say. Neither rural healthcare nor prison medical providers (House’s end result had he not been sentenced to death) are all that great themselves, and MS is an unpredictable disease that can do some of its worst damage years before detection. What we can say is, without the death penalty or a system determined to defend its own errors, he’d have had a chance, in an environment where his symptoms would have been more easily noticed and more likely taken seriously. Paul House also had a mother who spent the rest of her life either fighting or caring for her son; she should have been given every option he had.

Few would argue that innocence is the most important debate in capital punishment, with both sides using cases like Paul House. Supporters will argue his eventual, kicking-and-screaming exoneration proves we don’t execute innocent people; opponents point to how close he got to the gurney and wonder aloud what that implies about other judgment calls. Both of these arguments miss the horror of death row itself. Tennessee didn’t need a death chamber to destroy Paul House, and the fact that they didn’t get to use it shouldn’t be enough.