Two more tragic injustices have been uncovered in Houston in the span of a week, just as a panel created by the Texas legislature prepares recommendations on how to prevent wrongful convictions.
On July 23, Allen Wayne Porter was released from prison after DNA testing and other new evidence proved he did not commit the 1990 rape for which he was sent to prison 19 years ago. One week later Michael Anthony Green was released after spending 27 years in prison for a rape he did not commit.
It now appears that the victims in these cases may never get the justice they are due. Although the actual perpetrators have been identified, they cannot be prosecuted because the statute of limitations has expired.
In both cases, Harris County prosecutors were instrumental in developing the exonerating evidence and supported the releases - a remarkable change from the previous D.A.'s handling of innocence cases. The potential for a new era of cooperation among at least some prosecutors is most welcome, and critical to efforts to rescue the innocent from prison. Just as important, however, are the changes needed to prevent these wrongful convictions from happening in the first place. Such reforms are not being implemented in most parts of Texas, and putting those safeguards in place needs to be a top priority of the state's leaders.
On March 1 Texas Governor Rick Perry officially pardoned Timothy Cole, who was wrongfully convicted over two decades ago. Tragically, the DNA tests that proved Cole's innocence came too late: he died in prison in 1999 while serving time for a rape he did not commit. A faulty lineup led to inaccurate eyewitness evidence in Cole's case, which serves as a reminder of the urgent need for eyewitness identification reforms that increase reliability and reduce the risk of mistakes. Cole's case was one of the thirty-nine Texas wrongful convictions exposed by DNA profiled in The Justice Project's report Convicting the Innocent: Texas Justice Derailed.
(The next meeting by the Texas Forensic Science Commission is on Friday, January 29 in Harlingen, Texas. The previous 11 meetings have been held in Austin, Dallas, Houston or San Antonio. So yes -- Rick Perry's hand-picked puppet is doing everything he can to avoid public scrutiny on this very important issue in the middle of Perry's hyper-political campaign. - promoted by Phillip Martin)
Texas has seen more than its share of controversy surrounding forensic science in recent months.
Most recently, the Houston Chronicle reported that an audit of the Houston Crime Lab’s fingerprint division identified problems in more than half of the 548 cases selected for review.The problems discovered were serious enough to lead the authorities to require that more than 4000 violent crime cases from the past six years be reanalyzed—a process that no doubt will be very costly for the city of Houston. According to the Chronicle, the Latent Prints Comparison Unit suffers from “significant deficiencies with staffing, a lack of proper supervisory review, inadequate quality control, technical competence inconsistent with industry standards, insufficient training and inadequate standard operating procedures.”The Houston Police have confirmed that a criminal investigation into misconduct by at least one employee of the fingerprint unit has been opened.In addition to the shoddy work that was done, the unit faces a backlog of some 6000 cases.
Texas has made many headlines in recent years for the spate of exonerations of wrongfully convicted men. In most of these cases, fortuitous turns of events, along with the hard work of innocence advocates, led to solid proof that eyewitness evidence was mistaken. The same is true in the latest case, in which a Dallas judge released two men based on evidence developed by students at two of the state's university-based innocence projects.
Claude Simmons Jr. and Christopher Scott were released from custody in Dallas on October 23 based on new evidence of innocence, including the corroborated confession of one of the true perpetrators. According to prosecutors, it was mistaken eyewitness testimony that convicted the men for a 1997 murder. The two had already served over a decade of their life sentences when the innocence project students persuaded Dallas D.A. Craig Watkins to review the cases and pursue the exonerating evidence.
