In the summer of 1990, Minh and Linda Rogers were shot to death while working at their family-owned grocery in rural Gates County, North Carolina. Some money was taken. Sixteen year-old Linda was raped. The next year, Jerry Wayne Conner was tried and sentenced to death for the murders. His sentence was overturned on appeal, but after a re-sentencing hearing in 1995, Mr. Conner was again sentenced to die. In May of 2006, Conner came within 36 hours of execution before the North Carolina Supreme Court intervened. The Court didn’t want Jerry Conner to be killed until he had the chance to apply modern DNA technology to the semen found on Linda Rogers’ body. Unfortunately, the semen sample was too degraded to produce conclusive results.
We may never know if Jerry Conner killed Minh and Linda Rogers seventeen years ago. What we do know is that if and when lethal injection returns to North Carolina, Conner will be among the first scheduled to die. With that in mind, his attorneys have released a video on YouTube highlighting another major issue in the case: juror misconduct.
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