JACKSON, Miss.—A Mississippi Supreme Court has ruled that a death row inmate will not be allowed to seek additional DNA testing on crime scene evidence from the shooting deaths of two college students nearly 30 years ago.
Willie Jerome Manning, now 54, remains in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. He was convicted in 1994 on two counts of capital murder in the December 1992 killings of Mississippi State University students Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller in Oktibbeha County.
In 2013, shortly before Manning was scheduled to be executed, the U.S. Justice Department said there had been errors in FBI agents’ testimony about ballistics tests and hair analysis in the case. Manning’s attorneys asked the Mississippi Supreme Court to stop the lethal injection, and justices voted 8–1 to delay the execution to allow the testing of evidence….