'Dallas DNA' documentary series follows exonerees

[JonLP24]

DALLAS — For nearly 26 years, Johnnie Lindsey was in prison, a wrongly convicted man waiting for someone on the outside to believe in his innocence.

Last year, a DNA test from a rape kit proved Lindsey innocent, and he was released.

The 56-year-old man's sweetly subdued reaction upon hearing he will be freed is the dramatic high point in the opening episode of the six-part documentary series "Dallas DNA," premiering Tuesday at 10 p.m. EDT on Investigation Discovery. Relief floods across Lindsey's smooth face, his pursed lips showing the barest hint of a smile.

"On the inside, it was the feeling of experiencing a dream come true," Lindsey said in a recent interview with The Associated Press,

Lindsey's case is one of several profiled in "Dallas DNA," a series chronicling trailblazing Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins and his team's efforts to use DNA evidence to clear the innocent and confirm the convictions of the guilty.

A 2001 Texas law allowed inmates to request post-conviction DNA testing. But Dallas prosecutors routinely denied those requests until Watkins, the state's first black district attorney, took office in 2007.

Watkins took a different tack, throwing open his office's files and allowing the Innocence Project of Texas to review cases where DNA testing could prove someone was wrongly convicted.

The results have been astounding. Dallas County's 20 DNA exonerations are the most of any county in the nation and more than all but two states, according to The Innocence Project, a New York-based legal center. (In one of the 20 cases, however, the DA's office believes the exonerated man is guilty of a related crime and will retry him.)
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6394490.html

[X_Digger]

1. Awesome!

A friend of my wife's who is in law school in Houston is involved with the Innocence Project.

[ieoeja]

2. But they only execute guilty people in Texas?

I was a death penalty supporter right up to the date that a MAJORITY of death row inmates in Illinois were exonerated by DNA evidence. Obviously, I should have changed my opinion well before that. But sad to admit that for some reason the sheer injustice of it didn't strike home til it hit that magic 50%+ number.

Arguing against the death penalty since, I always end up arguing this point with Texan DUers who argue that was due to corruption in Illinois that simply does not exist in such large numbers in Tejas.

Turns out the real difference was the refusal by Texan prosecutors to turn over the evidence. Oops!


Of course, at this point they just switch the argument to, "but now we can use DNA evidence to gain indisputable evidence." Yeah, right. Cause the same prosecutors and cops in Tejas who sat on the DNA evidence that could prove their victims' innocence won't take that bottle of water their victims drink from and rub it on crime scene items to transfer the DNA evidence they need.

And you know why they will do this? Because they are absolutely convinced that they got the right guy, but just don't have the right evidence. They honestly believe they are doing a service to the community by taking their victims off the street.

[JonLP24]

3. I can't find it

But I read a number where on average a so and so number are exonarrated each year. I can't give the number because I can't find the link.

In my opinion this is enough reason to be against the DP in the USA.

Introduction

The USA will soon carry out its 300th execution of an African American prisoner since resuming judicial killing in 1977. By 10 April 2003, 290 blacks had been put to death, and at least a further 10 were scheduled to be killed by the end of July. African Americans are disproportionately represented among people condemned to death in the USA. While they make up 12 per cent of the national population, they account for more than 40 per cent of the country’s current death row inmates, and one in three of those executed since 1977.

While the United States resorts to the death penalty more than most countries – it has carried out well over 700 executions since 1990 – it is also the case that only a small percentage of murders result in execution in the United States. It is relevant, therefore, to ask if the capital justice system selects these defendants for death in a manner that is free from racial bias.

On 18 March 2003, two African American men were executed. The two people for whose murder Louis Jones and Walanzo Robinson were killed – Tracie McBride, white, and Dennis Hill, black – were among some half a million people murdered in the USA since 1977. Blacks and whites were the victims of these murders in almost equal numbers.(2) Yet 80 per cent of the people executed since 1977 were convicted of murders involving white victims.

Most murders in the USA are intra-racial, that is, the alleged perpetrator and the victim are of the same race, as in Walanzo Robinson’s case.(3) Yet of the 845 prisoners executed between 17 January 1977 and 10 April 2003, 53 per cent were whites convicted of killing whites and 10 per cent were blacks convicted of killing blacks.(4

Texas

Texas is the main death penalty state in the USA, accounting for more than a third of the country’s executions since judicial killing resumed in 1977.(31) Research in the 1980s concluded that in Texas a murder of a white person was more than five times more likely to result in a death sentence than the murder of an African American.(32) Statistics compiled by the Texas Defender Service (TDS) suggest that racial disparities continued into the late 1990s. The organization found, for example, that while 0.8 per cent of murder victims in Texas were white women, 19.3 per cent of the prisoners arriving on death row between 1 January 1995 and 31 December 1999 had been convicted of killing white women. Eleven per cent of the defendants condemned to death during this period had been convicted of killing black men. Yet black men accounted for 23 per cent of murder victims in Texas.(33)

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR51/046/2003/en/bfe434a5-d712-11dd-b0cc-1f0860013475/amr510462003en.html

Much more info at link.