AG denies legal access to hair of executed criminal
San Jacinto News Times - November 2007

COLDSPRING – Anti-death penalty activists do not have legal ground to gain access to the hair of a career criminal executed Dec. 7, 2000 for the capital murder of a San Jacinto County resident.
According to San Jacinto County Criminal District Attorney Bill Burnett, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has issued an opinion stating that physical evidence, such as hair, does not fall under the Public Information Act and therefore the hair will not be released for testing.
The controversial one-inch hair was the only physical evidence from the 1989 robbery-murder scene of Point Blank liquor store owner Allen Hilzendager. The hair fragment was linked to Claude Jones who was found guilty in San Jacinto County of capital murder and later executed in Huntsville. On the eve of Jones’ execution, then-Gov. George Bush denied a request for a stay so that the hair could undergo DNA testing. Bush earlier had endorsed such testing in life-or-death cases.
Since Jones’ 1989 trial, the hair has been locked away in the San Jacinto County District Clerk’s office. Concerned the hair was going to be destroyed, a group of anti-death penalty activists, including The Texas Observer, a liberal Austin-based magazine, and New Your-based Innocence Project, filed suit in state district court seeking release of the hair for mitochondrial DNA testing.
Burnett said Friday that he is pleased the attorney general upheld what he believed all along – that death penalty activists do not have legal ground to gain access to the hair.