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Comments on Criminal Issues
October 11, 2007
YET ANOTHER HARRIS COUNTY DNA EXONERATION
Houston Criminal Defense Attorneys Beware! Exoneration Marks Third Criminal Defendant Wrongfully Convicted Because of Mishandling of Evidence by the Houston Police Crime Lab
In May of 1993, in the Third Ward of Houston, Texas, a 38-year-old woman was asleep in her home when she was abruptly awakened by a man who put a knife to her throat. The intruder raped the woman and fled the residence. The victim called the police to report the sexual assault. Two police officers arrived at the scene one hour later. The officers identified a “wet spot” on the sheet where the rape occurred. The rape victim told the officers that she had felt the assailant’s features during the attack but had only gotten a brief glimpse of him while he was in her home. The only light in the victim’s residence came from a street light across the street.
The police began to question the neighbors about the rape incident. One neighbor recalled that she had seen Ronald Gene Taylor in the vicinity earlier in the night. Taylor lived less than a mile from the rape victim’s home. He had been living area for just six months, having recently moved to Houston from Huntsville. The police went to his home, rousted him out of bed, and hauled him off to jail. They told him only that he had been accused of raping a woman.
The police could not immediately locate the victim to view Taylor in a lineup, so they videotaped the men they had assembled for the lineup. A lone police officer then took the videotape to the victim’s residence where she could view it. Taylor did not have an attorney nor were there any other witnesses to this lineup. While viewing the videotaped lineup, the victim suddenly remembered that her assailant had a tooth missing. This information had not been part of her initial description of the assailant. She had told the two officers that she managed only got a “glimpse” of her assailant before he fled. Taylor had a tooth missing. The victim promptly identified him as her assailant.
It is unclear from the public record is whether the victim experienced the “sudden recollection” about the missing tooth after viewing Taylor or prior to the viewing. What is clear is that the police investigation ended with the victim identification Taylor. The case was closed as far as the police were concerned.
Taylor maintained his innocence, to anyone who would listen.
“Rape is one of the worst crimes you can do,” he was recently quoted in the media as saying. “I don’t ever understand rape, but I have lived all these years with that mark.”
At the time of his arrest Taylor was engaged to be married. His fiancée, Jeanette Brown, refused to believe even consider the possibility that the man she loved could commit such a crime.
“I know that man, and I know he is not capable of doing something that awful,” she was quoted by the local media as saying.
Taylor’s mother, Dorothy Henderson, was equally convinced of her son’s innocence.
“He always said that he was innocent, and I kept the faith that one day it would come through that it was not him,” she told the media.
Taylor had too much faith in the criminal justice system from the beginning.
“I was so sure that the truth would come out, that they knew it was not me that I told my lawyer not to even tell me if (prosecutors) offered a plea bargain,” he said recently.
But a Harris County jury, drawn from jury pools that tend to favor conviction over acquittal, could not get the truth right in May of 1995. The prosecution’s case was circumstantial: the victim made an in-court identification and a serologist from the Houston Crime Lab testified that no semen was found on the sheet, therefore, Taylor could not be excluded as the assailant. The jury found Taylor guilty and assessed his punishment at 60 years in the Texas prison system.
In 2001 John Farmer, Jr., the former Attorney General for the State of New Jersey, spoke about the need for eyewitness guidelines in the wake of so many DNA exonerations.
“It is axiomatic that eyewitness identification evidence is often crucial in identifying perpetrators and exonerating the innocent,” he said. “However, recent cases in which DNA has been utilized to exonerate individuals convicted almost exclusively on the basis of eyewitness identifications, demonstrates that this evidence is not foolproof.”
In 1999 the U.S. Department of Justice released a report entitled “Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement” that recommended implementation of safeguards in eyewitness identification procedures. Studies of DNA exonerations have consistently revealed that three out of four of those wrongfully convicted were due to “mistaken identification” and 60 percent of those “mistaken identifications” involved African-American or Hispanic defendants.
While Taylor’s family was devastated by the jury verdict, his mother knew that the eldest of her five children was innocent and she was not about to accept the jury’s verdict. She finally convinced the New York-based Innocence Project that her son was innocent and secured their assistance in working toward his exoneration.
In 2006 the Innocence Project located the sheet with “wet spot” on it. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office cooperated with the Project’s proposal to have independent DNA testing conducted on the sheet. Results from the test were disclosed this past summer. Taylor was not the rapist. DNA from the sheet identified the assailant as Roosevelt Carroll, a longtime sex offender currently serving a sentence in the Texas prison system for failing to register as a “sex offender.”
Taylor’s exoneration marked the third time a criminal defendant had been wrongfully convicted because of the mishandling of evidence by the Houston Police Crime Lab. In 2002 the local media conducted extensive investigations into the operations of the crime lab and exposed staggering negligence and mismanagement in those operations. These media reports prompted city officials to conduct an “audit” of the lab’s serology department. This audit resulted in the release of two inmates who had been wrongfully convicted of rape charges based on false and erroneous testimony of serologists from the crime lab. The exonerations prompted the closure of the crime lab’s serology department.
In 2005 Mayor Bob White vowed to clean up the “disgraceful mess” associated with the crime lab and to restore law enforcement integrity to its operations. The Mayor assigned Michael Bromwich, a former U.S. Justice Department inspector, the task of investigating the crime lab, its procedures, and issue recommendations. Bromwich completed his investigation in June 2007. He identified at least 180 cases in which serology department had made major mistakes. Those cases are still awaiting prosecutorial and judicial review.
Taylor became the 201st person exonerated by DNA evidence in this country. Harris County District Attorney Charles Rosenthal promptly apologized to wrongfully convicted man.
“I feel awful,” the district attorney said. “Nobody wants have an innocent person wrongfully convicted and sent to prison.”
Rosenthal vowed to apply as much pressure as possible to keep Carroll behind bars as long possible. Scheduled for a 2010 goodtime release, the sex offender could be held until 2019 without those benefits. Rosenthal had made it publicly clear that he is determined to see to it that this serial sex offender does not receive any early release benefits. It is all the district attorney can do because the five-year statute of limitation has expired on the 1993 rape.
But hidden in the post-exoneration maneuvers in the Taylor’s case is a refusal to attach official accountability for the wrongful conviction. The crime lab serologist who testified at Taylor’s trial that no evidence of semen was found on the sheet worked at the lab between 1993 and 1998. The district attorney’s office should thoroughly investigate (1) whether the serologist even tested for semen and (2) if he did conduct those tests, what procedures were employed. This review should also include the 180 cases in which Bromwich identified as problem cases handled by the crime lab’s serology department.
The district attorney’s office should then conduct an “in-house” inquiry into the actions of the prosecutor who handled the Taylor case. The initial police report clearly stated that a “wet spot” was observed on the sheet where the rape occurred. The prosecutor had access to that initial report. He knew before the trial that the crime lab’s serologist would testify that no “semen” had been found on the sheet. That lab finding should have triggered a red flag with the prosecutor. The “wet spot” was there – two officers saw it, and placed it in their report. It contained someone’s DNA. The prosecutor should have thoroughly examined the lab report and questioned the serologist about the testing methodology.
Second, the victim did not pick Taylor out of a physical lineup. She identified him in the presence of a lone police officer who brought her a videotape of the actual lineup. At some point while viewing this videotaped lineup she suddenly remembers that her assailant had a missing tooth. Based on media reports, it is assumed that this recollection came after she viewed Taylor and saw that he also had a missing tooth.
To say the least, the pretrial identification procedure employed by the police was extremely suspect. The prosecutor had an ethical responsibility to make sure that the victim’s pretrial identification was untainted in any way, particularly since there was no independent corroboration of her identification of Taylor as the assailant.
The District Attorney’s Office and the Texas Attorney General’s Office should propose to the Texas Legislature uniform eyewitness identification procedures for all law enforcement agencies in the state. Texas would follow the lead of New Jersey and Minnesota in implementing such mandatory uniform procedures that have built-in safeguards against “mistaken identifications.”
Understanding that hindsight is always 20/20, the conduct of Taylor’s trial counsel deserves scrutiny as it is instructive to all defense attorneys. All defense attorneys have relied upon the results of crime labs, which we now know are unreliable and untrustworthy by design or neglect. Either way, it is imperative that we all looks upon such results as extremely suspect.
Taylor professed his innocence. His family was staunch supporters of that claim of innocence.
Defense counsel could have moved the court for independent testing of the “wet spot” on the sheet. Counsel had access to that initial police report identifying that “wet spot.” He should have known that the “wet spot” was physical evidence which begged independent testing.
Defense counsel could have employed private investigators to determine if there had been other sex offenses committed in that particular neighborhood; or if any other sex offenders living in the area. Roosevelt Carroll lived in that neighborhood, less than a mile from the Taylor residence. It was likely that the assailant probably lived in the neighborhood.
Finally, defense counsel hopefully contacted the neighbor who told police that she had seen Taylor in the vicinity prior to the rape. How did she know Taylor? What motivated her to give his name to the police as a possible suspect? It was her statements to the police that provided the officers with “probable cause” to arrest Taylor, and, to say the least, it was flimsy probable cause. This probable cause issue should have been thoroughly vetted by defense counsel.
Shelton Sparks was the attorney who handled Taylor’s appeal.
“We had concerns from the beginning that this was a case of mistaken identification,” Sparks told the media following Taylor’s exoneration. “But we did not pursue DNA testing, because we did not believe there was any evidence to be tested based on the (HPD analyst’s) testimony at trial.”
Hindsight is indeed 20/20 – but there was evidence in the record. Two police officers observed a “wet spot” on the sheet. That was physical evidence. The serologist testified at trial that no semen was found on the sheet. He did not say the sheet had been “destroyed” – at least there are no media reports reflecting such testimony. The Innocence Project was able to locate the sheet in 2006 and have it tested. The Project clearly recognized the significance of the “wet spot” on that sheet.
The bottom line is that: that “wet spot” was critical evidence prior to trial, during the trial, and in the post-conviction appellate process. It sat idle in some evidence file for thirteen years before the Innocence Project secured it for testing in 2006 and it did so because the serologist was either neglectful or intentionally deceitful.
Ray Charles could have seen the myriad of problems associated with this case from the beginning. Below are some of those problems:
• The rape victim did not get a good look at her assailant.
• The only light in her residence came from a street light across the street.
• A nosey neighbor told police she saw Taylor in the vicinity prior to the rape. What basis did she have for thinking or believing he was the “rapist?” She was not a “concerned citizen.” She had to embellish her statements in order to provide the police with probable cause for arrest. The mere fact that she saw Taylor in the vicinity, without more, was not sufficient to establish probable cause for arrest.
• The police locked on Taylor and did not investigate for any other sex offenders in the neighborhood. Why? The real rapist, Roosevelt Carroll, lived less than a mile from Taylor. Why wasn’t Carroll investigated by the police. Why didn’t the police conduct a minimum investigation of other possible suspects before they arrested Taylor? Why didn’t the police ask Taylor to voluntarily appear in a lineup before arresting him?
• Taylor was arrested before the victim identified him. The victim did not attend the physical lineup. The police videotaped a physical lineup that included Taylor. This videotape was shown to the victim by a lone police officer. Why were there no other witnesses? Did the officer make any “suggestive” remarks to the victim to indicate Taylor as a suspect?
• The victim remembered the assailant had a missing tooth during the showing of the videotaped lineup. Did this sudden recollection occur after she viewed Taylor? Was it pointed out to her by the lone police officer?
• The initial police report cited the “wet spot” on the sheet. That “wet spot” should have been treated more seriously by both the prosecution and the defense.
• The serologist’s testimony that the sheet did not contain any semen should have triggered prosecutorial concerns in light of the “wet spot” evidence.
The individuals charged with the official responsibility of investigating, prosecuting, and defending Ronald Gene Taylor did not by any stretch of the imagination carry out their professional duties and responsibilities in a proper, adequate manner. It is interesting that the district attorney’s office now wants to do every thing it can to keep Roosevelt Carroll in prison, particularly since it cannot prosecute him for the 1993 rape for which Taylor was wrongfully convicted.
The State of Texas will pay Taylor $50,000 for each year he was wrongfully imprisoned, a pittance for years of imprisonment as a convicted rapist.
It is cases like Ronald Gene Taylor, and at least two dozen others involving DNA exonerations, that create the need for the Texas Legislature to create an Innocence Commission empowered with authority to investigate all cases involving potential wrongfully convicted persons. This would serve the interests of the general public and the state’s judicial system. As the matter now stands, the taxpayer is simply saddled with a $50,000-a-year bill for each wrongfully convicted year served by innocent persons. The taxpayer is entitled to more. The taxpayer should be publicly informed about who was responsible for a wrongful conviction as well as why and how it occurred.
An Innocence Commission would make these determinations following a thorough investigation. The Commission’s findings would be reported to the Legislature. These findings would provide a public accountability for wrongful criminal convictions that not only damage the innocent person but undermine the very integrity of the state’s entire criminal justice system.
The real issue now is not how to exact greater punishment from Roosevelt Carroll but how to prevent any more Ronald Gene Taylors.
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