Death_Penalty_2005_nowy.qxd 2005-09-08 17:00 Page 40 THE DEATH PENALTY IN THE OSCE AREA Three prisoners have been released since August 2004 on the grounds that they were innocent of the crimes for which they had been convicted. Ryan Matthews, convicted in Louisiana in 1999, had the charges against him dismissed in August. He had been sentenced to death for a crime committed when he was 17 years old, but he was granted a new trial in 2004 after it was found that the state had suppressed evidence and after DNA testing implicated another person in the murder. Ernest Ray Willis was sentenced to death in Texas in 1987 for the arson murder of two women who died in a house fire in 1986. A federal judge overturned the conviction in 2004 after an arson specialist reviewed the original evidence and concluded that there was no evidence of arson. A third man, Dan Bright, sentenced to death in Louisiana in 1996, was released in August 2004.136 On 28 February 2005, an Ohio judge dismissed all charges against Derrick Jamison in a murder for which he had been sentenced to death in 1985. His conviction had been overturned on appeal in 2002, and the prosecuting authorities eventually decided not to retry him.137 Pardon or commutation At the federal level, the president has the authority to grant clemency, and, at the state level, the respective governor has the authority to grant clemency, although the process differs from state to state. According to official statistics, clemency on humanitarian grounds was granted in four cases during 2004 and in one case during the first half of 2005. In June 2005, Texas Governor Rick Perry commuted the death sentences of 28 juvenile offenders to life imprisonment, thus bringing the state into compliance with the US Supreme Court ruling of March 2005. 136 137 Death Penalty News, Amnesty International, December 2004. Death Penalty News, Amnesty International, June 2005. 40