n a state with thousands of criminal convictions every year, the number of documented wrongful convictions represents only a tiny fraction. There can be no doubt that the system usually gets it right. Nevertheless, the devastating costs of wrongful convictions make it clear that Texas cannot afford to assume that these cases are merely the cost of doing business in the criminal justice system. Texas must recognize that the system is flawed and can be improved by implementing simple procedural reforms that greatly reduce the risk of error.
While the majority of this report focuses on the wrongful convictions uncovered through DNA testing in Texas, they are only the tip of the iceberg. The advent of DNA technology has given our criminal justice system a tool that can provide incontrovertible evidence of guilt—and innocence—in cases where the presence of biological evidence is dispositive. Unfortunately, biological evidence is present in only a fraction of criminal cases. While DNA is an invaluable tool, it does not solve the problems of unreliable evidence that repeatedly surface when wrongful convictions are discovered. The vast majority of cases simply do not have probative DNA evidence.
In addition to the thirty-nine DNA exoneration cases in this report, there are scores of exonerations in Texas for which there is no DNA evidence. While a defendant is innocent until the prosecution proves guilt, after a conviction occurs, the burden shifts to the defendant to prove innocence. New evidence that merely casts doubt on the conviction is not nearly enough to overturn a conviction—which is why DNA evidence, where it exists, is so successful in exonerating the innocent. Without DNA evidence, inmates face an almost insurmountable challenge to establish their innocence conclusively. Still, a surprising number have been cleared against the odds.
In one high-profile set of non-DNA wrongful convictions, dozens of people were framed in a drug sting by a rogue undercover officer. In that 1999 case, forty-six residents of the small town of Tulia, Texas were arrested for selling cocaine based solely on the word of one undercover officer. After it was discovered that the undercover officer had fabricated all the evidence in the cases, a collective lawsuit brought by the wrongly convicted was settled for six million dollars.
Perhaps one of the most well-known Texas wrongful convictions was that of Randall Dale Adams. Adams was convicted of the murder of a Dallas police officer and sentenced to death. His case was the subject of the documentary film The Thin Blue Line. The true killer, David Harris, subsequently confessed on tape. After twelve years in prison, new evidence of innocence came to light through Adams’ appeals and he was eventually released.
Another non-DNA exoneration occurred in the case of Clarence Brandley, a janitor who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in Montgomery County, Texas for the rape and murder of Cheryl Ferguson in 1981. Brandley’s conviction was overturned in 1989 after new evidence showed that authorities had suppressed exculpatory evidence. In addition, an investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice found additional misconduct by the authorities in the case. All charges against Brandley were eventually dropped.
In 2004, Ernest Willis was released after serving almost seventeen years on Death Row for the arson murder of two women. Willis had been living in the house where the fire occurred. Willis escaped uninjured and investigators believed that he had intentionally set the fire. Years later, the Pecos County District Attorney hired an independent arson expert who concluded that the evidence used against Willis was without any scientific basis, and there was no evidence of arson. The prosecutor eventually apologized “for so many lost years” and said that Willis “simply did not do the crime.”
In each of these cases—only a few among many convictions overturned in Texas without the benefit of DNA evidence—flawed evidence was fortuitously exposed. In some cases, evidence of guilt evaporated under greater scrutiny; in others, affirmative evidence of innocence was found. Yet in all of these cases it was exceedingly difficult to undo the damage of flawed evidence in the courtroom and to rectify the wrongful conviction.
A recent review of evidence used in non-DNA cases reinforces the importance of implementing procedures that enhance the quality of evidence relied upon by the system. In October 2008, the Dallas Morning News published an investigative series on the alarming number of exonerations that have emerged from Dallas County. The newspaper reviewed numerous cases and documented, for example, that eyewitness evidence is routinely relied upon in robberies, where it is rare to have DNA evidence, even with little or no corroboration of the eyewitness evidence.
It is no accident that the vast majority of DNA exonerations involve sexual assault cases where biological evidence is often present with the potential to clearly indicate guilt. In these cases, DNA testing reveals errors and weaknesses in many types of evidence and procedures. Our criminal justice system relies on these same kinds of evidence and procedures in cases where DNA evidence is not available, putting additional innocent suspects at risk. DNA exonerations are but a window to the larger, unseen problem. We know that the same evidence suffers the same flaws in non-DNA cases. What we do not know is how many innocent individuals have been convicted based on faulty evidence.
