Here is "the only reason that Harris County is not engulfed in exonerations," according to Blackburn: The district attorney, as the chief law enforcement officer in the county, has not made preservation of evidence from closed cases a priority. Indeed, a spokesman for District Attorney Ken Magidson confirmed that prosecutors typically ask defendants to waive their objection to destruction of evidence, as part of every plea agreement.
Harris County thus has just three DNA exonerations on its record, while Dallas County, which is more careful to preserve, has 20. Ours are not aberrations in a sound justice system. As Blackburn said, "they're the lucky ones whose evidence didn't get thrown away."
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Photo Courtesy Dorothy Henderson
After his release, Ronald Taylor celebrates with his parents Herman and Dorothy Henderson.
AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Billy Smith II
Taylor asked Houston City Council members to "help people get some justice."
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Exonerees do not tend to live happily ever after, but following his release, Taylor married a girlfriend who had waited for him all these years, Jeannette Brown, and he moved to Atlanta to be with her. He has started a lawn-care business and says that "everything's going lovely, man," and only when you press him will he tell you about his medical problems, his lack of health insurance, his debt and the trouble he everywhere has on job and credit and rental applications explaining 14 missing years of his life.
Those who put him in prison have meanwhile gone on with their lives.
Detective Julie Hardin has retired. Her complaint history shows that she was never disciplined in her career, save for one misconduct allegation ("sustained") as a recruit.
Maurita Carrejo seems to have recovered from the incompetence she displayed at the crime lab. A Google search reveals that she has found more work in science, this time as a researcher with the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center.
And Vanessa Velasquez, who prosecuted Taylor, has carried her standards of evidence to the judiciary. Presiding over the 183rd State District Court, she is now presumedly addressed as "your honor."
Neither the victim nor the detective nor the crime lab analyst nor the prosecutor has ever been in touch with Taylor since he was found innocent. Carrejo and Velasquez also did not return calls for this story; a police department spokesman claimed not to know how to forward a message to Hardin.
"I ain't mad at them," Taylor says. "Don't do no good to get mad." But he also can't help feeling that he's owed something here, and just to be fair, he has decided to file a lawsuit. Taylor doesn't know for what amount. He'll leave that to the jury. If the facts are fairly presented, he says, they'll make the right decision.
"I believe that people are fair," says Taylor. "I don't know why I still believe that, but I do."
