A three judge panel of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed Monday with a lower court decision that Tennessee death row inmate Paul Gregory House's murder trial 22 years ago was "fundamentally unfair" and ordered a new trial within 180 days.

Gilbert S. Merritt, the presiding judge on the panel, said that House should not have been prosecuted in the first place and that the state should have released him 10 years ago when DNA evidence pointed to his innocence.

House was convicted of the rape and murder of Carolyn Muncie of Maynardsville, but later evidence implicated her husband in the death.

House could be released from prison after a May 28 bail hearing. House, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and must use a wheelchair, would be released into the care of his mother and live in her Crossville home.

The appeals court decision came in the wake of a U.S. District Court ruling last December in which Judge Harry S. Mattice Jr. ruled that House had been a victim of misconduct by the prosecution, which withheld possible exculpatory evidence, and ineffective assistance by his lawyer, who failed to discover witnesses who could have testified in House's defense.

In addition, DNA evidence was developed in House's favor 10 years ago.

The semen found on the victim's body, underwear and nightgown actually came from her husband and not from House.

Judge riddles case

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled two years ago that the DNA evidence created enough doubt about House's guilt that "it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found (House) guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."

In addition, certain blood evidence has been tainted by years of handling that raised questions about its credibility.

And witnesses, who were available at the time, later came forward to say that Muncie's husband had implicated himself in his wife's death.

"The blatant prosecutorial misconduct in this case shows two things," Merritt said in an interview after the ruling.

"First, the local district attorney in East Tennessee should never have prosecuted House in the first place, but certainly should have released him more than 10 years ago once he received the exculpatory DNA evidence.

"Second, the local district attorneys, rather than the Attorney General or the Governor, exercise almost complete control over the system of criminal justice in Tennessee.

"They are frequently mistaken and frequently abuse their power," Merritt said.

No one from the Tennessee Attorney General's office would comment about the court's ruling.

Facts were withheld

In the appeals court hearing last Wednesday in Cincinnati, Jennifer Smith, representing the attorney general's office, argued against a new trial for House, saying that the DNA evidence made no significant difference because "there never was evidence of rape. There was evidence of kidnapping" before Muncie was slain.

But Stephen Kissinger of the Federal Public Defender's office in Knoxville said House's attorney did not sufficiently pursue witnesses who were aware of strained relations between Muncie and her husband.

The husband, Hubert Muncie, testified that he was at a dance hall at the time of the murder and returned home to find his wife missing.

But witnesses who never testified at trial later said they had seen Carolyn and Hubert Muncie arguing outside a dance hall the night of the killing or saw her husband leave the club shortly after she left.

The prosecution withheld from the defense that the Muncies had had sexual relations the morning of the slaying and that prosecutors knew for a fact that the semen belonged to the husband, though his blood type and House's were the same.

The defense theory was that the husband killed his wife as part of an ongoing abusive relationship.

"This is a case where the local DA made an egregious error 22 years ago and continues to this day to refuse to admit the error in the face of clear evidence that someone other than House committed the crime," Merritt said yesterday after the ruling had been made public.

"These gross injustices will continue so long as law enforcement agencies and the Attorney General, the governor and the legislature continue to overlook or countenance this kind of prosecutorial misconduct."