Excerpted from "Mean Justice" by Edward Humes, Pocket Star Books, 1999.

Jesse DeWayne Jacobs is executed in Texas for the murder of a suburban Houston woman in an abandoned house. Even though a prosecutor said Jacobs did not commit the crime. It was not enough to induce the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the execution. Prosecutors originally had won the death sentence by convincing a jury that Jacobs pulled the trigger in the crime, though he claimed his sister had done it. Later, at the trial of the sister, the same prosecutor who convicted Jacobs announced that the sister had indeed pulled the trigger, and that Jacobs had no idea what his sister planned to do at the time she committed the crime. She received a ten-year prison sentence. In a six-to-three vote, the U.S. Supreme Court said it was perfectly permissable for the same prosecutor to argue mutually exclusive theories in separate trials and to proceed with the execution of Jacobs. Justice Paul Stevens dissented, saying that one of the prosecution's versions of the case had to be a lie, raising "a serious question of prosecutorial misconduct." Stevens further wrote, "In my opinion, it would be fundamentally unfair to execute a person on the basis of a factual determination that the state has formally disavowed."