"If you do that," Velasquez said, "if you do that today, you're sending a message to every single juror that sits on any kind of rape case in this county that if for whatever reason a victim doesn't recall every specific detail, doesn't have a xerox memory, that they should cut them loose...[And] you'll be sending a message to him and to other rapists like him that if they don't ejaculate on somebody, then you're going to be let go. You'll be found not guilty. Don't reward him for that."
Indeed, the jurors did not reward Ronald Taylor for failing to ejaculate on somebody, nor for escaping detection at the crime scene. Instead, they found him guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, of aggravated sexual assault.
_____________________
Paul Thatcher
Taylor married his girlfriend, Jeannette Brown, who waited for him all these years.
Paul Thatcher
He still has trouble explaining the missing 14 years of his life to employers, credit agencies and landlords.
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Many years later, a different analyst in a different laboratory would test the bedsheet again, would find the semen stain that Carrejo had not and would conduct the DNA comparison that would establish the innocence of Ronald Taylor. Taylor would become just the third convict from Harris County exonerated due to DNA testing, and Jeff Blackburn of the Innocence Project of Texas would say that such cases "open a window onto the justice system and allow you to see how things really work." But all of this would occur many years later.
Being charged with rape was so humiliating to Taylor that he hadn't wanted his family to attend the trial. After he was found guilty, he called to tell his mother he had been sentenced to 60 years, and "that might be the one thing that shook me," he says, "just listening to my mom crying, 'no, no, no!' So I hurried up and got off the phone with her."
He had earlier spent about five years in prison, but knew very well that this experience would be different. When he arrived at the Gaza West Unit in Beeville, the guards at intake stripped him, told him to shut up and told him the rules. The most fundamental rule was that he could never escape, and, realizing this, Taylor saw that he could rage about just as much as he wished — could work himself into a heart attack or a nervous breakdown. Could even kill himself, and no one would care. It would be "just another day in prison" for everyone else, he knew, and "don't nobody cry, just as long as there's a reasonable explanation for what happened to the body."
He began mumbling the Serenity Prayer to himself. "Getting mad don't do no good," he decided, and he tried not to ponder his innocence or to consider how long he would be in prison, but only to tell himself, "I'm in prison. You live here. This is your home."
As a new arrival, Taylor started out working in the fields, hacking weeds with hand tools. Throughout the prison, there were "all these little jobs" to do, and eventually he graduated to work inside. As hard as he tried not to think about his life, Taylor couldn't help noticing that the jobs taught no useful skills and didn't seem to prepare prisoners in any way for life outside. The jobs also paid nothing, and since "you have to have money to survive" in prison, Taylor says, many prisoners learned "how to hustle" — how to make their jobs pay. Kitchen workers stole sandwich fixings to sell later; laundry workers pinched clean, starched clothes to auction off for family visits.
Prison officials knew all about this black market, says Taylor, and if you were too obvious in your game, they'd catch you and send you back out into the fields. They never reduced the need for the black market, though, and so prisoners would simply work their way back inside and start hustling all over again, says Taylor, playing "a cat-and-mouse game that continues until you get so good at your hustle, you can get by without getting caught."
Taylor finally concluded that the prison system's claim that it reforms criminal behavior was "a joke." "In essence," he says, "they're training you to be a better criminal."
Because his family regularly sent him money, Taylor had no need to develop a hustle of his own. He also had something that other people wanted, in a place that was filled with predators. Guards try to stop prison violence, Taylor says, but "it's just one of the things the system can't protect you against." There were riots to establish the momentary supremacy of one racial group over another, along with countless smaller fights — in the cellblock, the eating area, the rec yard, the shower — to determine who was going to eat whose food, spend whose money, have sex with whom.
While murderers are "probably the only people who brag about what they're in prison for," Taylor, as a convicted rapist, arrived near the very bottom of the prison pecking order. Rape is a crime that "tarnishes your reputation," he explains, and rapists are seen as weak, as "perverted," as in need of killing. Taylor was only lucky he was not weak at all but stood six feet tall and weighed 230 pounds. "When it comes time to fight, you don't have to win," he knew, "but you have to fight," or everyone will come after you "like a pack of wolves."
