The Harris County DAs office announced today that they'll be seeking to free a man who has served five years for sexually assaulting an eight-year-old boy.DNA evidence has exonerated Ricardo Rachell, DA Kenneth Magidson says."As soon as the evidence was found to exonerate him, we have acted as swiftly as possible to see that justice is done in this case," he announced.Yeah, that'll make the last five years seem like a New York minute.
Photo courtesy patlykos.comA non-working DNA lab and lack of proper policies were among the biggest contributors to the wrongful incarceration of Ricardo Rachell, District Attorney Pat Lykos said today at a press conference in the Criminal Justice Center.Lykos and Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt apologized to the public and to Rachell, who was exonerated by DNA evidence in 2008 after serving five years of a 40-year sentence for child molestation. (Andrew Wayne Hawthorne, who in 2008 pleaded gu
Wrap your head around this one: "Since 1994, Texas has exonerated 39 innocent people who served over 500 years in prison for crimes they did not commit."That's the first sentence of The Justice Project's new report, "Convicting the Innocent: Texas Justice Derailed." And after skimming through this thing, Hair Balls is tempted to tweak the subtitle: "Texas Justice: Assholes and Idiots."Faulty eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of these wrongful convictions. Other factors "include false for
