Home
Politics
This Texas Department of Criminal Justice handout photo shows Henry 'Hank' Skinner. (AFP/HO/File)
Nevertheless, her words proved prophetic.
"He was three meters from the death chamber," she said referring to the room where prisoners are strapped to a gurney and injected with a poisonous cocktail that first puts the inmate to sleep, then paralyzes him, then causes his heart to stop beating.
Mere minutes and inches from death, word came from the US Supreme Court late Wednesday granting a last minute stay of execution and allowing her husband, Henry "Hank" Skinner, to live another day.
Not that Ageorges-Skinner, 49, feels she can truly breathe freely.
"There is still a long way to go," she told AFP by telephone as she renews their campaign to prove Skinner's innocence, which has won the support of French leaders in Paris.
Skinner, 47, had been scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6:00 pm (2300 GMT) Wednesday at the prison in Huntsville, Texas.
He was convicted in 1995 for the killings of his girlfriend and her two sons in his Texas home. But Skinner insists new DNA tests will prove he did not commit the 1993 New Year's Eve triple murders.
He maintains that a third person must have carried out the killings because he had passed out under the influence of anti-anxiety medication, painkillers and alcohol. Blood tests at the time confirmed the presence of the drugs in his bloodstream.
The Supreme Court must now decide whether to take up the case on the merits, otherwise a new execution date will be set, the justices said in a brief decision.
Ageorges-Skinner, with long brown hair and a determined look, has fought tirelessly for her husband, whom she had not even been allowed to lay eyes for nearly two years.
She was finally allowed to visit him on the eve of his scheduled execution, talking with from behind reinforced glass during what were to have been his last hours. She was then allowed to phone him on the day.
She divides her life between two continents, sometimes in Texas, sometimes in France.
"Texas is my second home," she said. "It is a state that I love a lot and I have met a lot of extraordinary people here."
Still she rants against the "corrupt justice" of the state that she says led to her husband's false incarceration and conviction, "a justice that relies on speed and results."
The pair's unlikely romance began in 1996 when they first began to correspond. She paid him her first visit in 2000.
"In May 2008, he asked me to marry him," Ageorges-Skinner said.
But even on their wedding day, they were kept apart by a criminal justice system that requires total physical isolation for inmates condemned to die.
"The only time when I will be able to touch him is after his execution, at the funeral -- a day I hope never comes," she said.
Hopeful, but still a realist, she concedes that her husband's death sentence could still be carried out.
But, says Ageorges-Skinner, even if her husband dies, her love will live on. "It won't change anything," she said. "Whatever happens, we will always be together. Death is not an end in itself."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He was three meters from the death chamber," she said referring to the room where prisoners are strapped to a gurney and injected with a poisonous cocktail that first puts the inmate to sleep, then paralyzes him, then causes his heart to stop beating.
Mere minutes and inches from death, word came from the US Supreme Court late Wednesday granting a last minute stay of execution and allowing her husband, Henry "Hank" Skinner, to live another day.
Not that Ageorges-Skinner, 49, feels she can truly breathe freely.
"There is still a long way to go," she told AFP by telephone as she renews their campaign to prove Skinner's innocence, which has won the support of French leaders in Paris.
Skinner, 47, had been scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6:00 pm (2300 GMT) Wednesday at the prison in Huntsville, Texas.
He was convicted in 1995 for the killings of his girlfriend and her two sons in his Texas home. But Skinner insists new DNA tests will prove he did not commit the 1993 New Year's Eve triple murders.
He maintains that a third person must have carried out the killings because he had passed out under the influence of anti-anxiety medication, painkillers and alcohol. Blood tests at the time confirmed the presence of the drugs in his bloodstream.
The Supreme Court must now decide whether to take up the case on the merits, otherwise a new execution date will be set, the justices said in a brief decision.
Ageorges-Skinner, with long brown hair and a determined look, has fought tirelessly for her husband, whom she had not even been allowed to lay eyes for nearly two years.
She was finally allowed to visit him on the eve of his scheduled execution, talking with from behind reinforced glass during what were to have been his last hours. She was then allowed to phone him on the day.
She divides her life between two continents, sometimes in Texas, sometimes in France.
"Texas is my second home," she said. "It is a state that I love a lot and I have met a lot of extraordinary people here."
Still she rants against the "corrupt justice" of the state that she says led to her husband's false incarceration and conviction, "a justice that relies on speed and results."
The pair's unlikely romance began in 1996 when they first began to correspond. She paid him her first visit in 2000.
"In May 2008, he asked me to marry him," Ageorges-Skinner said.
But even on their wedding day, they were kept apart by a criminal justice system that requires total physical isolation for inmates condemned to die.
"The only time when I will be able to touch him is after his execution, at the funeral -- a day I hope never comes," she said.
Hopeful, but still a realist, she concedes that her husband's death sentence could still be carried out.
But, says Ageorges-Skinner, even if her husband dies, her love will live on. "It won't change anything," she said. "Whatever happens, we will always be together. Death is not an end in itself."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
