ames Lee Woodard quickly became a suspect in the December, 1980 rape and murder of his former girlfriend, Beverly Ann Jones. Woodard was taken into custody on New Year’s Day.
Two eyewitnesses placed Woodard with the victim close to the time when the crime occurred, but there was no evidence that tied Woodard to the crime. The defense provided two alibi witnesses who stated that Woodard had been thirty miles away from the scene on the night of the murder. Woodard was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
James Lee Woodard spent twenty-seven years in prison due to prosecutorial
misconduct and two mistaken eyewitness identifications.
DNA testing excluded Woodard as the perpetrator of the sexual assault, but because the other charge against him was murder, he needed to prove that the same person committed both crimes.
An investigation by Woodard’s lawyers revealed that the Dallas County prosecutors withheld key evidence from the defense in 1981. Several days before Woodard’s trial, authorities learned that three men had been with the victim on the night of her death: a man told investigators he went with Jones to a South Dallas convenience store where she got into another car with three men and left. He could not identify the car or the men in question. In addition, police neglected to investigate the three men as suspects, even though one was in prison on a charge of aggravated rape during Woodard’s trial. This finding, along with a forensic pathologist’s conclusion that the rape and murder “were tied together in such a way that the rape results would conclusively show who the perpetrator was,” helped prove Woodard’s innocence. Woodard was released on April 29, 2008.
Because of two mistaken eyewitness identifications and prosecutorial misconduct, James Lee Woodard spent twenty-seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit, more time than any other DNA exoneree in the country.
