TX- Recent DNA exonerations have revealed troubling gaps in the criminal justice system.
TX- Since Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins took office in 2007, incidents of wrongfully convicted men being released from Texas prisons have become almost commonplace.
The sheer number of DNA exonerations — and the efforts to uncover how the courts failed so miserably — have revealed troubling gaps in the criminal justice system: Eyewitnesses are more fallible than jurors might think; forensic evidence isn't always reliable or interpreted correctly; the way police run lineups can lead to wrongful convictions. The trouble is, those problems may just as easily plague cases in which no DNA exists. Modern science has shown the justice system the tip of the iceberg, but how many innocent men and women are suffering in prison and likely to stay there because they have no evidence to test? Where do law enforcement and innocence advocates, faced with sorting out the guilty and innocent, go from here?
In 1998, Duke's stepdaughter insisted that she lied when she told her aunt that he touched her inappropriately. Dallas criminal defense attorney Robert Udashen took Duke's case and filed a writ of habeas corpus claiming his innocence based on her changing her story. Though the director of the Dallas Children's Advocacy Center testified that the recantation was credible and no medical evidence of sexual abuse existed, both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction: Duke remained behind bars.
A decade later, Watkins took office and instituted an open file policy, making it easier for defense attorneys to obtain evidence from prosecutors. Udashen requested a review of Duke's case, and last March he caught a huge break. Prosecution files revealed that the girl's maternal grandmother, who died in 2006, had given a statement saying she believed the child was lying and that her aunt coerced her accusation. The statement, made before Duke's trial and previously unknown to Duke's defense attorneys, corroborated the recantation.
"That's really the only thing that changed," Udashen says, but it was enough for a new hearing in front of Judge Hawk, who declared Duke "actually innocent," meaning that with the new evidence, no reasonable jury would have found Duke guilty.
"The DNA exonerations have sensitized everybody to the fact that there are a lot of innocent people in prison," says Gary Udashen. The brothers' firm has represented 11 exonerees. They buck the Dallas County trend in that most of their cases have not been rooted in DNA evidence, and they were successful with several exonerations even before Watkins took office.
Nationwide, there have been more than 800 exonerations since 1989, a majority of which are non-DNA cases. Since DNA evidence was stored indefinitely in Dallas County and Watkins has been actively pursuing DNA cases, Dallas, with a sweeping majority of DNA-based cases, is out of step with the nation.
http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-12-29/news/beyond-dna-difficult-tests-for-the-justice-system/