City of Houston Sued; Disgraced Crime Lab on Trial After Wrongfully Convicted Man Exonerated After 17 Years in Prison
By: Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
George Rodriquez was a 26-year-old young man in 1987 when he was convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl in Harris County. A critical piece of evidence that led to his conviction was a pubic hair found in the girl’s underwear. A serologist with the Houston City Police Department’s crime lab, who we now know had a history of fabricating evidence to suit local prosecutorial and law enforcement needs, determined that the hair did not belong to a suspect named Isidro Yanez but the serologist did not eliminate Rodriquez as the owner of the hair. Seventeen years later DNA, which was not used as evidence in criminal trials in 1987, established that the hair in fact belonged to Yanez and not to Rodriquez.
At age 43 Rodriquez was released from the Texas prison system to be embraced by three daughters who had grown up while he was wrongfully imprisoned. He was able to visit the grave site of his deceased father who had not survived long enough to see his son vindicated. It was indeed a hard 17-year ordeal. There is no comfort for innocent men in prison—not even from their fellow inmates, especially if they have been convicted a sex offense against a child. The “sex offender” stigma places these individuals at the bottom of the prison subculture. The only real support they have are family members who refuse to accept the validity of the “criminal conviction” imposed upon their loved one.
It’s now payback time. George Rodriquez is now appearing before a local federal court where his attorney Barry Scheck, co-director of New York’s Cardozo School of Law’s Innocence Project, is demanding that the City of Houston to pay his client “tens of millions” of dollars in damages for the 1987 wrongful conviction. In his opening statement in U.S. District Court Judge Vanessa Gilmore’s courtroom, Scheck told jurors: “We will prove a false and misleading serology report violated [Rodriquez’s] constitutional right to a fair trial.”
Scheck announced his intention to call former Harris County District Attorney Johnny Holmes and former Houston Police Chief Lee Brown as witnesses. Attorney Robert Cambrice, who is representing the City of Houston, did spare the rod of accountability for Holmes or Rodriquez’s defense attorney. The Houston Chronicle reported (June 17, 2009) that Cambrice laid the blame for Rodriquez’s wrongful conviction “on bad lawyering by the prosecutor and Rodriquez’s late defense attorney that led to the false conviction, not an unquestioned lie by a city employee.” (more…)
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