aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, February 24, 2007

New Dallas DA to review decades of convictions

Morning Edition reported yesterday that the new Dallas DA, Craig Watkins, a 39-year-old former defense lawyer who led a Democratic sweep of Dallas County offices in November to become Texas’ first black district attorney, says he’ll reopen hundreds of cases from the past 30 years to see whether DNA tests might reveal wrongful convictions:

“It’s a whole different world in the Dallas criminal justice system,” says defense attorney Gary Udashen. “It is a world where if a client of ours is innocent, we feel like there’s openness in the District Attorney’s office to hear what we have say, to look at what we have to show them, where we don’t anticipate resistance every step of the way.”

Udashen’s firm alone has had seven Dallas clients who were convicted, sent to prison, exhausted their appeals and then ultimately - with the pro bono help of Udashen and his colleagues - were found to be innocent.

Udashen says Dallas used to be like many other cities in Texas when it came to the DA’s office. If it got a conviction, it defended that conviction to the bitter end, even if strong scientific evidence was later uncovered that the convicted was wrongly convicted. [...]

In a twist of irony, Dallas has long outsourced its lab work. And instead of destroying evidence post-conviction like many law enforcement labs, the private labs preserved all the evidence. Blackburn says as a result, Dallas has a treasure trove of potentially exonerating DNA evidence.

The Houston Chronicle has more on Watkins:

By all accounts, he represents a sharp break from the law-and-order conservatives who have held the office for decades, starting with Henry Wade, who retired in 1986 after 36 years in office.

Wade prided himself on a high conviction rate and stiff sentences, but along with the office’s hard-nosed reputation came accusations of a win-at-any-cost attitude and a history of wrongful convictions that shadows it to this day.

In addition to Waller, 11 others have been exonerated since 2001 through new DNA testing, more than in any other U.S. county. Nine of those date to Wade’s administration.

“I’m not part of that failed system,” said Watkins, who twice tried for a job in the office. “I’m fresh. I have nothing to protect.”

Dallas was number 1 in crime for 8 of the past 10 years, they elected this guy. I can only hope it says that voters there saw that what they were doing was not working. Arresting and jailing people for crimes they did not do does not make for a safer public.