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 forensic testimony, reliance on unreliable or limited forensic methodologies…testimony from informants or accomplices with incentives to lie, false confessions and guilty pleas, suppression of exculcaptory evidence, ineffective assistance of counsel and investigative and prosecutorial tunnel vision.”
Some of the above rang true in the recent exoneration in Houston of
Ricardo Rachell, who served six years in prison on a
child-sexual-assault conviction before authorities got around to
checking the DNA sample he voluntarily gave before his arrest. In that
case, Rachell’s decidedly un-Matlockian attorney never filed a request
for the DNA – but the Justice Project reports out that “unlike many
other states, Texas has no statute that mandates automatic discovery of
key case documents, such as police reports and witness statements.” So
if you can’t afford, say, Rusty Hardin, and instead get stuck with one
of those patently Texan lawyers who are apt to fall asleep during
trial, exculpatory evidence might not ever see the light of day.
Rachell’s isn’t the only Houston case mentioned in the report. Hair
Balls was especially dumbfounded by the case of Anthony Robinson, who
was sentenced to 27 years for raping a University of Houston student.
He was convicted solely on the victim’s misidentification. Robinson
just happened to be on campus on the day of the rape, “picking up a car
for a friend.”
Now get this: in 2000, after DNA testing proved Robinson’s innocence,
the Harris County D.A.’s office “still did not believe Robinson to be
an innocent man. The DA’s office argued that the semen came from an
unknown man with whom the victim had consensual sex and that Robinson
still had something to do with the crime. There was no evidence to back
up this theory.” (Man — if only the real rapist hung around campus
long enough to pick up a friend’s car!)
Hair Balls hopes our new D.A. and HPD Chief Harold Hurtt read this
report. We have a feeling that it might just be a real eye-opener.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2009.
