Ronald Taylor Is One of Perhaps Hundreds of Innocent People Harris County Has Sent to Prison

Taylor claims he was never more than bruised in a fight. Afterward, though, he would sometimes encounter the friends of his foe, whose hostility encouraged him to seek friends of his own. Only after Taylor managed to round up a few allies did he seem to find any security in prison — and to begin enjoying the fights. In the Coffield Unit near Palestine, where he spent most of his term, his building had "all the windows busted out," he explains, and there were cats walking around and birds flying through, and on those days when the mosquitoes were bad and the temperature inside was over 100 degrees, fighting, he says, was "just a way to let loose." "If I had something I wanted to get off my chest, we would just get it on," says Taylor.

Such displays seem to have contributed to his acceptance. What they finally said in prison about Ronald Gene Taylor, according to Taylor, was, "That fool there, he's crazy, but he ain't no rapist." Taylor, in turn, came to see that "there are a lot of good guys in prison," and also many innocent men. He didn't think the innocent were so hard to spot. Since the parole board makes admission of guilt a condition for early release, most convicts would ultimately admit, "'Yeah, they got me. I done this here,' or they'd say, 'I ain't do it like they said I did it, but yeah, I did it.'" Always, though, "you got those who'll tell you they didn't do it," he says. Year in, year out, they would deny their guilt, and year in, year out, they would stay in prison.

Some of them Taylor thought he saw trying to escape through the prison law library — the barely literate men who came every day and tried to make sense of law books, tried to write appeals, often from memory because they couldn't afford the dollar a page they were charged for their own court records. When the response to these appeals came back from the court, it would often consist of a single page — a denial without explanation. When the prisoners wrote to ask for explanations, or file additional appeals, the court would often bar them from filing anything ­further.

It was the same message all over: There was no way out. Taylor saw men break against it — inmates barricaded themselves in their cells and threw feces at anyone who tried to enter. He witnessed a man walk to the end of the second row, climb a rail and dive into the concrete. ("I didn't see him no more after that.") And everywhere, there were the sedated men, drinking coffee and shuffling by — "got this Thorazine shuffle." Taylor, though, seems to have survived by not trying to break down walls or to fight his way out from the library, but by encouraging people on the outside to fight for him. He wrote to senators, to congressmen, to church and human-rights groups. Mainly, he wrote his family. Taylor mailed about a letter a day, and otherwise, tried not to think about time. "Because that's when it will really hurt you," he explains, "when you go thinking about the time and the date. If you don't worry about it, it takes care of itself. You just let time pass. Just let it go."

There were few clocks or calendars by which to mark it. The prisoners destroyed the clocks, and so Taylor knew the passage of a year mainly by the holidays — "there's holidays in prison" — and the passage of years he knew mostly by the changes he saw in himself — the weight he gained eating pasta, rice and potatoes, the high blood pressure and diabetes he developed. Eventually, more recent arrivals began saying, "Man, you getting some years under your belt, ain't you?" "And then it was like I woke up one day and, 'Damn, I been here 14 years.'"

It was about then that the Innocence Project, a national group dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing, got in touch. Taylor's stepfather, Herman Henderson, had alerted them to the case, and they had found the bedsheet and only needed a sample of Taylor's DNA for comparison. Taylor dared again to hope; this time, his hopes were not dashed. The results brought back "overwhelming proof," as Project lawyers phrased it, "that Mr. Taylor was not the man who sexually assaulted Ms. A. on May 28, 1993."

Taylor is not the sort to jump for joy, but he was happy — "you can believe that." He gave away his fan, his radio and his candy, and one morning about a year ago, came through the gates and stepped into a government car. The car transported him all the way back to Houston, back to the people who loved him and to those who had sent him away.
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Texas has experienced 34 DNA exonerations — more than any other state — and "these compounding exonerations," as State Senator Rodney Ellis says, "are clear and convincing evidence that our criminal justice system is broken." Time after time, Ellis has pushed reforms to prevent the conviction of innocent people, but most of these proposals have been defeated, mostly on the grounds that they're unnecessary. Ellis is baffled. Only in criminal justice, he says, do "you get a knee-jerk reaction that the system is just fine and improvements aren't needed. At times, it seems there's more of an effort in trying to ignore mistakes than any real effort to address them."