46,000 Innocent Lives Destroyed by False Allegations, Wrongful Convictions
By: Houston Criminal Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
Seton Hall University School of Law Professor D. Michael Risinger in 2007 published the results of a study, Innocents Convicted: An Empirically Justified Wrong Conviction Rate, in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (Vol. 97, No. 3) which said that between 3.3 and 5 percent of all capital rape-murder convictions in this country involve innocent defendants. Going even lower than Professor Risinger’s 3.3 percentage, Radley Balko, senior editor of Reason Magazine, utilized the nation’s prison population in this country in 2008 and a 2% wrongful conviction rate to conclude there were at least 46,000 innocent people incarcerated in the nation’s prison system. 46,000.00!
Released from the Texas prison system in October 2008, Tony Hall now claims that he was one of those 46,000 innocent inmates—and there is compelling evidence to support his claim as recently reported in the Lufkin Daily News (here, here, and here). In 1993 Hall was living in Hudson, Texas with a woman who had a 7-year-old son. The boy reportedly made an outcry to his mother that Hall had sexually molested him. Hall denied the accusations. He was nonetheless indicted, and on May 13, 1993, following a three-hour trial before an Angelina County judge, he was found guilty. Five months later Hall was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the same judge. Hall had rejected repeated advice by his defense attorney to accept a 10-year probation which would have required a guilty plea admission.
Hall was sent to the Texas prison system, which leads the nation in sexual violence and assaults, where he was repeatedly raped and physically abused because he was a hated “child molester.” Hall tried to tell everyone he was innocent. No one listened—not even the Texas Board of Pardon and Paroles before whom his case appeared every two years. To secure parole in this state (and for that matter any state in the country) an inmate must admit his guilt, accept responsibility for his crime, and express remorse about it. Hall would not have any of this because, as he explained to the parole authorities, he was innocent.
As a result, Hall served every day of his 15-year term only to find after his 2008 release from prison that he walked into an even more terrifying position in the free world: he became a “registered sex offender,” a stigma similar to the “child molester” moniker he had endure in prison. Behind the barbed wire and gun towers, Hall had only to worry about avoiding the next rape or physical beating, while in the free world he had to avoid being falsely accused of another sex offense or violating the conditions of his sex offender registration. He told Lufkin Daily News reporter Jessica Cooley that he could not even take his Shih Tzu out for a walk without being made to feel like a monster.
Subscribe
