The State - News from May 23, 1986

A Kings County jail nurse, acting on a search warrant, took blood and hair samples from a man facing retrial for a 1962 murder. Booker T. Hillery Jr., 54, had refused to give the evidentiary samples, even after he was instructed to do so by two judges and his attorneys. Hillery had to be handcuffed and chained with leg irons. “We explained it to him. He was reluctant . . . ,” said Sheriff’s Capt. O. R. MacFarlane. “It was basically a show of force, without any force.” Hillery, ordered to die in the gas chamber for the murder of Marlene Miller, 15, of Hanford, won a retrial in January when the U. S. Supreme Court struck down his conviction because blacks were excluded from the grand jury that indicted Hillery, who is black.