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Well, too bad wasn't imprisoned under dubya's dummerorship, because duyba said dubya had a perfect record (for executing only truly guilty people, no False Positives).
DALLAS – A Texas man declared innocent Tuesday after 30 years in prison could have cut short his prison stint twice and made parole — if only he would admit he was a sex offender.
But Cornelius Dupree Jr. refused to do so, doggedly maintaining his innocence in a 1979 rape and robbery, in the process serving more time for a crime he didn't commit than any other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.
"Whatever your truth is, you have to stick with it," Dupree, 51, said Tuesday, minutes after a Dallas judge overturned his conviction.
Nationally, only two others exonerated by DNA evidence spent more time in prison, according to the Innocence Project, a New York legal center that specializes in wrongful conviction cases and represented Dupree. James Bain was wrongly imprisoned for 35 years in Florida, and Lawrence McKinney spent more than 31 years in a Tennessee prison.
Dupree was sentenced to 75 years in prison in 1980 for the rape and robbery of a 26-year-old Dallas woman a year earlier. He was released in July on mandatory supervision, and lived under house arrest until October. About a week after his release, DNA test results came back proving his innocence in the sexual assault.
A day after his release, Dupree married his fiancee, Selma. The couple met two decades ago while he was in prison.
His exoneration hearing was delayed until Tuesday while authorities retested the DNA and made sure it was a match to the victim. Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins supported Dupree's innocence claim.
Looking fit and trim in a dark suit, Dupree stood through most of the short hearing, until state district Judge Don Adams told him, "You're free to go." One of Dupree's lawyers, Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck, called it "a glorious day."
"It's a joy to be free again," Dupree said.
This latest wait was nothing for Dupree, who was up for parole as recently as 2004. He was set to be released and thought he was going home, until he learned he first would have to attend a sex offender treatment program.
Those in the program had to go through what is known as the "four R's." They are recognition, remorse, res ution and resolution, said Jim Shoemaker, who served two years with Dupree in the Boyd Unit south of Dallas.
"He couldn't get past the first part," said Shoemaker, who drove up from Houston to attend Dupree's hearing.
Shoemaker said he spent years talking to Dupree in the prison recreation yard, and always believed his innocence.
"I got a lot of flak from the guys on the block," Shoemaker said. "But I always believed him. He has a quiet, peaceful demeanor."
Under Texas compensation laws for the wrongly imprisoned, Dupree is eligible for $80,000 for each year he was behind bars, plus a lifetime annuity. He could receive $2.4 million in a lump sum that is not subject to federal income tax.
[good for him. it is the least we owe him--RG]
The compensation law, the nation's most generous, was passed in 2009 by the Texas Legislature after dozens of wrongly convicted men were released from prison. Texas has freed 41 wrongly convicted inmates through DNA since 2001 — more than any other state.
Dallas County's record of DNA exonerations — Dupree is No. 21 — is unmatched nationally because the county crime lab maintains biological evidence even decades after a conviction, leaving samples available to test. In addition, Watkins, the DA, has cooperated with innocence groups in reviewing hundreds of requests by inmates for DNA testing.
Watkins, the first black district attorney in Texas history, has also pointed to what he calls "a convict-at-all-costs mentality" that he says permeated his office before he arrived in 2007.
At least a dozen other exonerated former inmates from the Dallas area who collectively served more than 100 years in prison upheld a local tradition by attending the hearing and welcoming the newest member of their unfortunate fraternity. One of them, James Giles, presented Dupree with a $100 bill as a way to get his life restarted.
At one point, Scheck pointed out that eyewitness misidentification — the most common cause of wrongful convictions — was the key factor that sent Dupree to prison. The attorney then asked how many of the others were wrongly imprisoned because an eyewitness mistakenly identified them. A dozen hands went in the air.
Not in attendance Tuesday was Dupree's accused accomplice, Anthony Massingill, who was convicted in the same case and sentenced to life in prison on another sexual assault. The same DNA testing that cleared Dupree also cleared Massingill. He says he is innocent, but remains behind bars while authorities test DNA in the second case.
Dupree was 19 when he was arrested in December 1979 while walking to a party with Massingill. Authorities said they matched the description of a different rape and robbery that had occurred the previous day.
Police presented their pictures in a photo array to the victim. She picked out Massingill and Dupree. Her male companion, who also was robbed, did not pick out either man when showed the same photo lineup.
Dupree was convicted of aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. According to court do ents, the woman and her male companion stopped at a Dallas liquor store in November 1979 to buy cigarettes and use a payphone. As they returned to their car, two men, at least one of whom was armed, forced their way into the vehicle and ordered them to drive. They also demanded money from the two victims.
The men eventually ordered the car to the side of the road and forced the male driver out of the car. The woman attempted to flee but was pulled back inside.
The perpetrators drove the woman to a nearby park, where they raped her at gunpoint. They debated killing her but eventually let her live, keeping her rabbit-fur coat and her driver's license and warning her they would kill her if she reported the assault to police. The victim ran to the nearest highway and collapsed unconscious by the side of the road, where she was discovered.
Dupree was convicted and spent the next three decades appealing. The Court of Criminal Appeals turned him down three times.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_dna_exoneration_texas
Well, too bad wasn't imprisoned under dubya's dummerorship, because duyba said dubya had a perfect record (for executing only truly guilty people, no False Positives).
Jesus ing Christ.
dubya said it, take it up with Jesus.
Boutonski can't help himself.
Damn, I wouldn't want to be locked up for a lousy $80,000 a year, but I guess it's better than the state just saying oops.
DNA testing has been out awhile and they just now got to him. Even more pathetic.
Prosecutors are loathe to open the pandora's box of DNA review and generally fight it tooth and nail.
No one wants to admit that we put a lot of people in prison solely for the color of their skin, evidence be damned.
Yes, the guy is black.
My God. How could you wish such things? Just when I think you are the lowest life form on earth, you show us you are even lower.
I think they don't care if they serve justice or not As long as they put someone behind bars, they have the public fooled about doing a great job.
... and if a lot of poor black kids end up in jail for things they didn't do, who cares?
20 out of 21 exonerated men in Dallas county were convicted by the through erroneous ID by the rapee.
don't y'all remember dubya bragging that he had NO DOUBT that the 100s executed in his dummernorship were guilty?
...
related:http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/p...ing-to-happen/In 1990, Michael Phillips was convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl at a motel in Dallas, Tex., where they both lived. Phillips pleaded guilty because, he said later, his attorney told him that as a black man who had been accused of raping a white teenager, he should try to avoid a jury trial. He went to prison for a dozen years and, after his release, spent another six months in jail after failing to register as a sex offender.
Now, nearly a quarter of a century after he was convicted, Phillips’s name is being cleared. And, in an unusual twist, he didn’t even realize it was happening.
Hundreds of people have been exonerated through DNA testing, with 317 such post-conviction exonerations since 1989, according to the Innocence Project. This week, the office of Craig Watkins, the Dallas County district attorney, announced that Phillips, 57, was going to join their ranks.
The Pope should canonize the people in The Innocence Project. They should also go after the prosecutors, lawyers, judges, always unaccountable, who ed up, the justice system could use a LOT of good will.
The Innocence Project and its various local offshoots (David Dow's programs in Texas, for instance) are a most welcome check on the overreaching of the judicial and executive branches with regard to actual innocence. It's shameful that our legal system took so long to commit itself to a willingness to exonerate those who can demonstrate actual innocence; the legal hurdles to introducing that proof have historically been substantial (notwithstanding the symbolic portrayal of justice as blind, she pretty jealously protects any conviction, no matter how suspect it might be) and those guys have been willing to fight those fights, no matter the odds. The frequency of their successes is striking; it's also alarming to think how many people may have been wrongly convicted cir stantially (or pressured into plea bargains) in cases where there is no hard scientific proof that might be available to exonerate them and where the relative power disparity between the resources of the State and those of the accused are significant enough to make trials uneven playing fields.
related:
Citing Fairness, U.S. Judge Acts to Undo a Sentence He Was Forced to Impose
Which ties with what FromWayDowntown was mentioning earlier, and describes how mandatory minimums and sentence 'stacking' can be used to penalize people for going to trial over accepting plea-bargains.
Federal review stalled after finding forensic errors by FBI lab unit spanned two decades
Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of a massive investigation started in 2012 of problems at the FBI lab has included flawed forensic testimony from the agency, government officials said.
The findings troubled the bureau, and it stopped the review of convictions last August. Case reviews resumed this month at the order of the Justice Department, the officials said.
U.S. officials began the inquiry after The Washington Post reported two years ago that flawed forensic evidence involving microscopic hair matches might have led to the convictions of hundreds of potentially innocent people. Most of those defendants never were told of the problems in their cases.
The inquiry includes 2,600 convictions and 45 death-row cases from the 1980s and 1990s in which the FBI’s hair and fiber unit reported a match to a crime-scene sample before DNA testing of hair became common. The FBI had reviewed about 160 cases before it stopped, officials said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...c97_story.html
Dallas County's Conviction Integrity Unit deserves credit too for recognizing that the obligation to see that justice is done does not always end at conviction.
Nominally, "justice" would seem to either require that sort of check in the preliminary stages of a criminal prosecution (ideally) or in a post-conviction cir stance and that such an effort be open to all kinds of exculpatory evidence.
We pay lip service, societally, to the notion of "justice" in our courts, but we've long been quite content with the belief that wholly innocent people just aren't subject to criminal prosecutions and that a person who has been indicted almost certainly has done something that warrants a conviction.
It wasn't too many years ago that the State of Texas argued vehemently against a new trial for a death row inmate whose public defender repeatedly fell asleep during trial. Taking that tack seems to be nothing other than support for heavy-handed prosecution (rather than fair trials) and, basically, the assumption of guilt in those who are prosecuted.
US law enforcement and its agencies as a whole are about the most smug and condescending group of assholes as can be. You are spot on about the big old they have taken on the notion of presumption.
Natapoff fingers plea bargains as a source of false convictions:
http://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery....004002&EXT=pdf
here's an example of exactly that: the prosecutor had no evidence tying Robert Jones to the murder of Julie Stott and had already convicted someone else for killing her.
Case spotlights code of silence among Chicago police
At hhis trial on drug charges nearly a decade ago, Ben Baker told a seemingly far-fetched tale about a corrupt band of Chicago police officers who ran a South Side housing project like their own criminal fiefdom, stealing narcotics proceeds, shaking down dealers for protection money and pinning cases on those who refused to play ball.
A Cook County judge at the time said he believed the testimony of veteran Sgt. Ronald Watts and officers under his command, not Baker's accusations that Watts and his crew had framed him.
But two years ago Watts was convicted on federal corruption charges after being snared in an FBI sting. Now, Baker is seeking to overturn his own conviction and 14-year sentence in a case that casts a spotlight on the police code of silence — a red-hot issue amid fallout from the dashboard camera video of Laquan McDonald's shooting.
In a court filing this week, his lawyers revealed dozens of pages of court and law enforcement records showing the Chicago police internal affairs division had been aware as far back as the late 1990s of corruption allegations involving Watts' team of tactical officers — yet did nothing about it.
The filing also cites a whistleblower lawsuit filed by two Chicago police officers who allege they faced repeated retaliation after going to supervisors about their discovery of the police corruption in the Ida B. Wells public housing development. When their complaints fell on deaf ears, they worked undercover for the feds, helping nab Watts
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...216-story.html
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