In the article below, a reporter has interviewed a prosecutor from Tarrant County, which has had only 1 DNA exoneration, and which borders Dallas County, which has had many, many wrongful convictions identified through DNA. The prosecutor claims that the prosecutors in Tarrant County simply has been more careful than prosecutors in Dallas County, and cites one good fact: Tarrant County had open-file discovery for decades, while Dallas County didn’t institute it until 2006. But I also know that Dallas County is rare in that it has actually saved the DNA in old cases at a much higher rate than most other counties. The question I’m left asking about Tarrant County is whether it has save all the DNA in all the old rape and murder cases like Dallas County. If not, then that, to me, is the biggest factor. You can’t have many DNA exonerations in your jurisdiction if you haven’t saved the DNA.
From the Star-Telegram.com:
Whenever people hear about the exoneration of another wrongly convicted person in Texas, the odds are the case is out of Dallas County.
Just three months ago, two more Dallas men were freed after serving almost 30 years of their 99-year sentences for a rape they did not commit. James Curtis Williams and Raymond Jackson became the 31st and 32nd men to be cleared by DNA testing in Dallas County since 2001.
In that same time period a total of 41 people in Texas had been exonerated as a result of post-conviction DNA testing, proving — as in the case of Williams and Jackson — that the victim or witness who identified them as the perpetrator was wrong.
The sickening statistics in Dallas County got me wondering why things were so different in the adjoining county of Tarrant, where there has been only one exoneration since 2001, the year Mark Amos Webb was freed after serving 13 years of a 30-year sentence for a sexual assault he did not commit.
My first suspicion was that Tarrant County was routinely and arbitrarily denying inmates’ requests for DNA testing. What else could explain the difference?
While it is true that Tarrant County has denied the vast majority of requests for post-DNA testing, there is nothing arbitrary about it, Assistant Criminal District Attorney Steven Conder explained to me.
In the last 11 years, Conder said, 170 convicted inmates have asked for DNA testing in their cases. Of those, 141 were denied and 25 have been granted so far. Five of those granted are still in the testing or further analysis process, but results from the other 20 tests show 12 were determined “inclusion” (confirmed defendant’s guilt), one was “exclusion” (not guilty), and seven were inconclusive.
Among those still being tested are two cases brought by the Innocence Project of Texas, which has been a driving force in fighting wrongful convictions in the state.
Under Texas law “the trial judge makes the decision whether to grant a defendant’s request for post-conviction forensic DNA testing,” Conder said. “The statute sets out five requirements for testing, but most litigation involves only Continue reading →
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