• Who escaped a death sentence only to get it faster?
Who escaped from death row before even being put on it?
From prison escapes to legal rulings, here are 10 people who managed to escape death
row.
10 – Kristen Gilbert • Kristen Gilbert was a nurse who worked
at a veterans hospital when she decided to go on a murderous rampage.
• She injected four of her patients with a stimulant that killed them via heart failure,
and tried to do the same to three others.
• But Gilbert lived in Massachusetts, which doesn’t observe the death penalty.
So how, exactly, did she end up anywhere close to death row?
• Well, the VA hospital is technically federal government property.
And since Gilbert committed her crimes in the hospital, it was tried in federal court.
• But despite the loophole that made Gilbert eligible for the death penalty, she ended
up with only life in prison.
9 – Le Van Tho and Nguyen Van Tinh • This escape from death row in Vietnam
didn’t exactly happen in a courtroom.
• A pair of drug dealers were each in solitary confinement for their involvement in a heroin
smuggling ring.
• Murder, theft, bribery, and kidnapping were among the charges they had been convicted
of.
The two were awaiting execution, but were able to escape the facility.
• They drove away together on a Honda Dream motorbike, wearing masks and helmets to hide
their identities.
• Luckily, they were only on the run for about a week before they were re-captured.
8 – Nicholas Yarris • Nicholas Yarris spent 22 years on death
row in Pennsylvania.
For some, that may seem silly – if someone has been sentenced to death, why keep them
in prison for so long?
• Well, people like Yarris are why.
After being on death row for 22 years on capital murder and rape charges, DNA evidence cleared
him of the crime entirely, putting him nowhere near the scene.
• Now Yarris is the first death row inmate in Pennsylvania – and the 15th in America
– cleared of his crime with DNA evidence before execution.
• But because Yarris was exonerated of his crime, he got no help from parole services
at finding a job.
He also got no money from the state from his wrongful conviction – just five dollars
and seven cents of his own money.
7 – Nguyen Thi Hue • Another Vietnamese drug lord found a much
different way to avoid a death sentence.
• Nicknamed the “Rose of Fire,” she joined up with a major drug runner in China
to open a major underground smuggling operation.
• She was eventually captured, and sentenced to death – but she found a loophole.
Under Vietnamese criminal law, pregnant women cannot be sentenced to death.
• So she paid one of the male inmates in the prison to… no, not to have sex with
her.
She paid him to leave her two bags of his semen, so she could impregnate herself with
a syringe.
• It worked, and her sentence was commuted to life in prison.
6 – Dayonte Resiles • Dayonte Resiles didn’t even wait to
be sentenced to death before he escaped from it.
• In his hearing for the murder of Jill Halliburton Su, of the Halliburton oil company
family, Resiles simply ran.
• He unlocked his chains and cuffs, shed his prisoner’s uniform, and bolted from
the courtroom.
• An internal investigation into his escape implicated as many as 8 accomplices, including
the bailiffs in the courtroom.
• Resiles was re-captured after a six-day manhunt.
5 – Martin E. Gurule • Martin Gurule somehow managed to both
escape his death sentence and move it way forward.
• In 1998, Gurule became the first escaped Death Row inmate in Texas since Floyd Hamilton,
a member of the Bonnie and Clyde gang, in 1934.
• His scheme involved dummies, a climb over razor wire, and a run through gunfire, but
it worked – he got outside the prison.
• A few days later, he was found dead at the bottom of a swampy river, presumably drowned.
So instead of escaping his death sentence, he simply carried it out on himself.
4 – Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky • Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky
avoided the death penalty, basically by pure luck.
• As they waited for their sentences to be carried out, the state of Connecticut ruled
that capital punishment was unconstitutional.
• Neither of these men, or the other 9 living Death Row inmates in Connecticut are having
their crimes cleared, of course.
• But because of the ruling, their sentences are being reduced to life without parole,
rather than death.
3 – Paul House • After 22 years on Death Row in Tennessee,
Paul House was released on bail.
But why would a convicted rapist and murderer be granted bail from a death sentence?
• That’s because in 2006, the Supreme Court took up his case and granted him a new
hearing.
DNA evidence examined the semen, cigarette butts, and blood under the victim’s fingernails
– and none of it matched House.
• The victim’s blood was found on House’s jeans, but there were unanswered questions
about whether the evidence was contaminated on the way to the forensics lab.
• The result of House’s hearing wasn’t just that he had his death sentence reduced.
He was exonerated of the crime entirely, and let go as a free man.
2 – Mecklenburg Six • The Titanic was considered an “unsinkable”
ship.
It sank in half a journey.
• Similarly, the Mecklenburg Maximum Security Prison in Virginia was considered “escape
proof."
Six death row inmates escaped from it in less than two hours using a stretcher, a blanket,
and a portable television.
• They overpowered the guards, started a prison riot, put on the guards’ riot gear,
and called in a false bomb threat.
Then, they acted as the “bomb squad,” carrying out the TV on the stretcher under
a blanket as “the bomb.”
• All six of the escapees were re-captured within a few weeks, which is good, since they
were all convicted of strings of violent crimes.
1 – “The Class of ‘72” • In 1972, the California Supreme Court
ruled the death penalty unconstitutional.
And that led to a whole bunch of legal complications with what has since been named the “Class
of ’72.”
• More than 100 people were on Death Row in Calfornia when that ruling came down.
Most of them ended up with life sentences, but about 40 percent of those Death Row inmates
found themselves getting paroled.
• Three of those parolees ended up killing again after going free, and 12 ended up committing
some other type of crime.
• One of them, Dennis Stanworth, killed his own 90-year-old mother.
At the trial, he pled guilty to everything before even being asked for a plea, and begged
the court for death.