Past Abuses, Hopes for Better Future
By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
Three recent stories in the Houston Chronicle exposed serious flaws in the Harris County criminal justice system. The first story concerned a 60-year prison term imposed on Andrew Wayne Hawthorne, a serial child molester. Hawthorne molested an eight year old boy in the fall of 2002. A crime for which a wrongly accused man, Ricardo Rachell, was convicted and sentenced to prison. Ricardo Rachell was convicted for this sexual assault and spent more than six years in the Texas prison system before readily available DNA evidence at the time of his arrest was finally tested and established his innocence.
We have written about this travesty of justice in previously but what disturbed us most about the recent Chronicle article (June 5, 2009; http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6457829.html ) were the photos of Rachell and Hawthorne. Rachell’s face at the time the photo was taken, and as it appeared at the time of his arrest and subsequent conviction, was horribly disfigured by a shotgun blast. There is no way these two men could have been mistaken for each other.
Unless, of course, the child victim was influenced into making the mistaken identification by someone bent on revenge and who was convinced that the disfigured Rachell, a neighborhood “freak,” was the man who molested the boy. The Houston Police Department accepted the child’s mistaken identification without any meaningful independent investigation to determine if the identification was correct. As a result, an innocent man spent six years in prison for something he didn’t do – and even with his innocence established through DNA testing, he will forever have the haunted memories of years in Texas prison labeled as a child sex offender.
The second Chronicle story (June 6, 2009) involved the release of a U.S. Justice Department report that found poor access to health care in life-threatening situations, unnecessary use of physical force, denial of mental health care, and inattention to suicide prevention violates the constitutional rights of inmates in the Harris County Jail. (more…)
