DNA testing: Charles Chatman free after 26 years

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After serving 26 years out of an aggravated sexual assault he never committed, Charles Chatman is now free - a 47 year old man.

No matter he didn't have front teeth, which should have made him look reasonably different from the real assailant, he was pulled from a line-up by a woman who was once his neighbour and that was all that was needed to put him in prison for 99 years. He had an alibi, but the fact his blood matched 40% blacks and that was the assailant's type too, was enough to sentence him. Now he's a free... 47 year old man. When they were locking him, he was 20 going on 21 or something like that. A snip:

With his siblings cheering in the courtroom, Charles Chatman was released from state custody this afternoon after serving nearly 27 years in prison for a rape that DNA now proves he didn’t commit. He is the 15th person to be cleared by DNA evidence in Dallas – more than any other county in the nation.

Chatman was convicted of a 1981 rape after he was misidentified in a photo lineup. His attorney, Michelle Moore (who was co-counsel with the Innocence Project of Texas on the case), credited Texas judge John Creuzot with pushing for DNA testing in the case. Creuzot said he became convinced of Chatman’s innocence after presiding over two previous hearings in the case. After earlier tests proved inconclusive, Chatman recently agreed to Y-STR testing, an advanced form of DNA testing that can determine a profile from a small sample. The risk was that this final test could have consumed the last of the biological evidence in the case. It proved to be the right decision, however, as the profile proved that another man committed the rape for which Chatman was serving a 99-year sentence.

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And some refreshing news:

Dallas has freed more inmates after DNA testing than any other county nationwide, said Natalie Roetzel of the Innocence Project of Texas. Texas leads the country in prisoners freed by DNA testing, with at least 30 wrongfully convicted inmates since 2001, according to the Innocence Project.

One of the biggest reasons for the large number of exonerations is the crime lab used by Dallas County, which accounts for about half the state's DNA cases. Unlike many jurisdictions, the lab used by police and prosecutors retains biological evidence, meaning DNA testing is a viable option for decades-old crimes.

District Attorney Craig Watkins also attributes the exonerations to a past culture of overly aggressive prosecutors seeking convictions at any cost. Watkins has started a program in which law students, supervised by the Innocence Project of Texas, are reviewing about 450 cases in which convicts have requested DNA testing to prove their innocence.

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Oh irony, one of the reasons he went out was the new district prosecutor:

After his election, Watkins instituted significant reforms to the way Dallas fights and prosecutes crime, including major changes to the way police conduct lineups and interrogate suspects. He stopped the inexplicable tradition of destroying death penalty files after conviction, which is often a barrier to DNA-based innocence claims down the line. He fired overly aggressive subordinates, and caused still more to resign in protest or frustration.

But most notably, Watkins not only hasn’t fought innocence and wrongful conviction claims, he’s been seeking them out, correctly understanding that a prosecutor’s job isn’t to see how many people he can throw in prison, it’s to work toward the fair administration of justice.

So it looks like prosecutors have developed some brains and their are now actually concerned with justice instead of obtaining convictions. How great. Or rather high time. For some more sweetness:

Watkins’ efforts have also aided by an odd anomaly: Because Dallas has long outsourced most of its lab work, it’s one of the few jurisdictions in the country where biological evidence has been preserved (despite the best efforts of the city’s prosecutors over the years). So testable DNA evidence exists for cases from well before DNA technology came into being. (Another argument for using multiple, independent labs in forensic testing.) Consequently, Watkins and the Texas Innocence Project can go back much further to investigate innocence claims than other jurisdictions.

Hurrah for flatheads doing what's in the bolded part. Let's destroy the evidence so that the sentence can't be reviewed and overturned later? What kind of justice is that? That's exactly what the crime of obstruction of justice is about, except prosecutors get away with it. And more:

So in the one county in America that has preserved DNA evidence going back to the 1980s, and in one of only a few where the district attorney’s office is an asset to innocence claims instead of a roadblock, we’re seeing much, much higher exoneration rates than we’re seeing in the rest of the country. I’m going to go out on a limb, here, and guess that this isn’t mere coincidence.

Come on. What's wrong with granting a convict a DNA test? What's wrong with allowing him a fair chance to prove his conviction was wrong? No matter if he really did it or not, he should be a prison and his factual innocence is merely an obstacle to punishing him for the crime he... waitasec, didn't do? Right, where's the logic in that? Sigh.

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More and more... and more and more faulty convictions passed on scarce evidence. They keep blaming it on prosecutors, but isn't something wrong with the system? There's a judge and a jury and somehow if the prosecutor wants you toasted, you're toasted. Perhaps it's time to change something? With policemen dropping shopping bags with credit cards to set people up with felonies (three strikes and you're out), prosecutors wanting to put you in jail and destroy any evidence that could free you at a later date, with better tech, as well as a tailored jury and a largely impotent judge, how is that system supposed to work, anyway? Not to mention something's particularly wrong with word vs word cases, especially rape cases.

 

Bleh. Had they just swiftly executed him and burned the files (iirc a highly successful practice Bush & Gonzales first established in Texas - if there's no evidence left, nobody can prove any wrongdoing or errors), nobody would question justice and nobody would suggest fallibility on parts of the courts or juries. Who are these people second guessing justice? This is a dangerous precedent, as it creates relativism where relativism mustn't be. Verdicts are final, just like executive acts. What use is a verdict that can be challenged 27 years later? Only where verdicts remain unchallenged, a stable order is guaranteed. Doubt corrodes order. Revisonists are thus subversive.

Next the revisionist and godless liberal secular humanists will use this case and call for the abolition of the death penalty, which is great, after all it's in The Holy Bible, by suggesting errors in such cases as well!

The solution is more death penalty for lesser crimes and destruction of all records after swift and excessive punishment is dealt out. /snark

 

I knew that somehow this had to be Bush's fault.

I think a lot of credit should go to Dallas. It may have taken a long time, but it looks like they are trying to clean up the criminal justice system. Good for them.

 

TGS,
I merely fault Bush for not being thorough enough. This could have been easily prevented by taking the steps I lined out. I say that because I share with Bush and Gonzales a Soviet prosecutor's confidence in the guilt of anyone in the machinery of state detention. They wouldn't be there if it wasn't for a good reason.

 

Of course!