Posted on 03/12/2003 2:07:52 PM PST by Illbay
By ROMA KHANNA and STEVE McVICKER
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle
Josiah Sutton was released from prison today after serving more than four years on a rape conviction that relied on faulty DNA evidence.
|
|
|
|
|
HEAR IT NOW
|
|
|
|
|
• Maintaining his innocence and continuing to fight • The first thing he wants to do as a free man
Audio requires the free RealPlayer.
|
"I just want him home. That's what I want right now," Josiah Sutton's mother, Carol Batie, said after state District Judge Joan Huffman ordered her son bonded out without cost.
"I will see you on the outside, " Sutton's attorney, Bob Wicoff, told him during a court hearing this morning.
Sutton was 16 when he was arrested and charged in the October 1998 rape of a Houston woman. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison after an analyst from the Houston Police Department crime lab testified that DNA evidence found at the rape scene was an exact match for Sutton.
The crime lab has since been shut down because of complaints about the poor quality of its work. Some 22 DNA samples have been or will be retested. One of those retests showed Sutton, now 21, could not have contributed the DNA found at the rape scene.
"I have been angry. I have cried. Now my main concern is getting him home," said Carol Batie, Sutton's mother. "He has to set his feet on free ground."
More than 25 members of Sutton's family filled the downtown courtroom this morning for the brief hearing that resulted in the decision to release Sutton.
"He was quietly confident," Wicoff said. "He told me all along that this would happen, and now it's here."
Wicoff said he will ask Gov. Rick Perry to pardon Sutton and will ask the Harris County District Attorney's Office to support the request.
District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal appeared briefly at this morning's hearing to say his office had no objection to Sutton being released on bail. Prosecutors have not said what they will do next with the case against Sutton, which cannot be dismissed without their support.
"This is not a case I would take to trial today," said assistant district attorney Joe Owmby, who prosecuted Sutton. "I am sorry this happened. He lost four and half years of his life because of this."
|
|
||
|
|
Buster Dean / Chronicle
Josiah Sutton waves to his family before the start of a court hearing in his case today. He was ordered released.
|
|
|
|
Sutton's case is one of more than 500 under review by the district attorney's office because of problems at the HPD crime lab.
Sutton was 16 when he was arrested for the rape of a woman who was taken at gunpoint from her Houston apartment complex by two attackers, raped and dumped in a Fort Bend County field. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison after an employee of the HPD crime lab -- which was shut down last year because of questions about the quality of its work -- testified that DNA from the crime was an exact match for Sutton.
New tests found DNA from two men on a sample from the rape, but neither matched Sutton, a former football team captain who has spent 4 1/2 years in prison.
"These results are pretty much a slam dunk," Wicoff said.
Sutton's case is one of more than 500 under review because of questions about the quality of work by the lab. An independent audit in December found widespread problems at the lab, including poor technique, the potential for evidence contamination and insufficiently trained analysts.
In a new development, a source close to the crime lab investigation said HPD's internal affairs division said 35 DNA samples were destroyed by rainwater that leaked through holes in the lab's roof during Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001.
The report indicates police and city officials knew of potentially case-threatening structural problems in the lab 18 months before the audit. Also, Mayor Lee Brown and Police Chief C.O. Bradford have previously downplayed the possibility the leaks contaminated DNA and other evidence.
The department refused to comment on the IAD report.
The audit prompted the department to shut down the lab in December and forced the district attorney's office to conduct a sweeping review of convictions. Prosecutors have ordered retesting in 22 cases, including those of seven death row inmates.
The district attorney's office has found DNA evidence from the HPD crime lab played no role in the cases against the 67 people from Harris County who have been executed since 1982.
In the Sutton case, forensic scientists who have reviewed the handling of the evidence say it represents some of the worst problems with the crime lab, including inaccurate analysis of evidence and misleading testimony about its findings.
Sutton was arrested five days after the October 1998 rape when the victim identified him and a friend walking down the street. She said she thought they were her attackers because they wore similar hats. She alerted police, who arrested the pair.
The boys provided blood and saliva for DNA comparison to samples from the crime. The HPD lab found Sutton may have been an attacker but that his friend could not.
Despite the victim's identification of both men, prosecutors proceeded only with Sutton's case because of the DNA evidence, which proved crucial in court.
An HPD crime lab examiner testified that DNA from the rape was an exact match for Sutton. Forensic scientists who have reviewed HPD's work say that testimony was grossly misleading and that 1 in 16 black men would have matched the profile.
One juror, Ronald Forrester, said he would not have convicted Sutton without the DNA evidence.
In addition to false conclusions and misleading testimony, the police lab's work on the Sutton case was shoddy, DNA experts say. Examiners consumed all four vaginal swabs in the rape kit, limiting the possibility for retesting to one vaginal smear. Also, the lab required three attempts to establish a "standard type" for the victim's DNA profile.
Sutton's lawyer, Wicoff, said he will seek a pardon from Gov. Rick Perry for his client. The governor's office said such action would have to go through the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles before coming to the governor.
"It is always disconcerting to hear of the likelihood that someone has been wrongly convicted," said Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Perry.
The district attorney's office has said it is too soon to declare Sutton innocent, pointing to the existence of DNA evidence on items that have not been tested and the victim's identification of the suspect.
Wicoff said he knows of no DNA material that has not been tested and notes the victim testified she was raped by two men. The second DNA analysis, conducted by private Houston lab Identigene, found the profiles of two attackers, neither of whom is Sutton.
The developments with Sutton's case have renewed calls for an independent review of cases that involve evidence processed at the police lab.
State Rep. Kevin Bailey, D-Houston, met with the Department of Public Safety on Tuesday about that agency assuming the work in deciding which cases need to be reviewed or retested.
Bailey plans to ask District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal to voluntarily allow DPS to oversee the the review. If Rosenthal refuses, Bailey would try to fast-track legislation that would authorize the DPS director to appoint someone to take charge of the HPD crime lab review "so that we can be sure that we have an outside independent person who's not part of the district attorney's office or the Police Department."
Bailey also will introduce legislation requiring all law enforcement agencies in Texas to only use accredited crime labs, otherwise the evidence would not be admissible in court. The House Committee on General Investigating, chaired by Bailey, will meet Thursday to discuss Bailey's bill and other possible legislation aimed at addressing what Bailey describes as "a crisis of confidence" in the HPD lab.
All crime will be found to have been committed by aliens.
This alone is worth investigating. When a lab enters findings as legal evidence, there should be some accountability into the source.
You astoundingly seem to be supporting incarceration of innocent people ! Have I got it right ?
From the article:
"Forensic scientists who have reviewed HPD's work say that testimony was grossly misleading and that 1 in 16 black men would have matched the profile."
I think this man is not only owed a pardon, and an apology, but a nice fat check for violating his rights. And the scumbag who testified per the quote above needs to be in jail for a perjury conviction.
This kind of behavior by law enforcement authorities is completely intolerable.
No, and that really wasn't my meaning. It's just that I know where we're headed now. DNA evidence, once thought to be a sure-fire nail in the coffin for perpetrators of crime, is now going to be doubted in nearly every case (and not just from THIS one; this is just another brick in the wall).
You are right. The FBI lab was making false reports to manufacture evidence. (Of course Janet Reno assured us that that was fixed and all is well now. So that problem must be gone.) In other places around the country there have been problems with DNA and other lab evidence.
I’d be hard pressed to convict on lab evidence, especially DNA evidence. I think lots of people are getting that way.
Cellmark, the DNA processing lab that analyzed the evidence for the LAPD, was found to have misidentified DNA remnants from horse's blood as human in at least one other case.
And the private detective acting as a DNA evidence consultant to the Simpson defense team, who as a police detective had been the lead investigator and presented the evidence in Indiana's first DNA case to be reviewed by that state's supreme court, was shot to death in a gangland-style murder, just as Judge Ito's bailiff was shot to death, and just as both the other waiters who had worked with Ron Goldman at the now-defunct Mezzaluna restaurant were similarly murdered.
OJ innocent? Almost certainly not, though probably not guilty of the murder as the prosecution presented it.. But a whole lot more to it than *just* OJ, at play with his knives? Oh yes.
Archy
Where did you hear this?
Thank you for clarifying your position.
The message to me in this case is twofold: we need to be sure our labs are reputably audited so we can rely on their evidence, and secondly, we need to prosecute lab folks who lie.
The scumbag who lied on the stand needs to go to jail. Don't pass go, don't collect $200.
I can't describe how incensed I am with this liar. My visceral reaction is to torture this scumbag, not just incarcerate him.
But pratically, I'd support reparations to the injured (something like $50K to $1M per year) and criminal prosecution of the liars.
We CANNOT tolerate such behavior on the part of our law enforcement personnel. Mistakes are one thing, lies are another.
An HPD crime lab examiner testified that DNA from the rape was an exact match for Sutton. Forensic scientists who have reviewed HPD's work say that testimony was grossly misleading and that 1 in 16 black men would have matched the profile.
The victim identified this defendant. And the DNA evidence, according to "DNA experts," showed that her identification was probably true: out of fifteen chances to have DNA conclusively prove her wrong, she chose the sixteenth, corresponding man who matched.
In other words, if someone who had no knowledge of the rape were to arbitrarily choose one black man from sixteen, that person had fifteen chances to be "wrong," and one chance to be "right." Yet the chooser in this case was the person who had actually been raped, not some uninformed chance-taker.
As shoddy and misleading as the DNA testimony was, if it had been rendered accurately, it was still powerful evidence of this man's guilt.
This article throws out all sorts of stuff which is irrelevant and misleading. It corruptly tries to imply that DNA exonerated this man. Given its tone, it is surprising it even put the most material truth in the buried paragraph at all.
Americans must understand, the attack on the death penalty has blossomed into an attack on the justice system itself. To undermine the death penalty, the opponents are making a concerted effort to convince Americans that there is no valid conviction whatsoever.
These opponents are leftist lawyers who do not particularly care if justice is not done for a rape, a robbery or a non-death penalty murder, as long as they can say at the end: "No one should should suffer the death penalty, because no conviction is ever reliable."
Unless this particular retest was BS, it did exactly what you claimed didn't happen; i.e. it showed that Sutton didn't copulate with the victim. If there are only 16 rape cases in the country with misidentified assailants and on the wrong end of a "1 in 16 test," it is likely the test is going to mis-implicate one of them. Even fingerprinting is far more accurate than that.
Where did you hear this
I was a newspaperman covering the case. Former Vincennes Police Department Detective John Birch was the lead investigator into the murder of Vincennes University co-ed Lisa McCracken on the very early morning of 13 October 1987 in her off-campus apartment. The case was taken to a grand jury, which indicted a young soldier then in the 4/16 Infantry Battalion of the First Infantry Division, then stationed at Ft Riley, KS. He was the nephew of another Vincennes PD officer.
Birch retired before the case came to court [it was later dropped after the prosecutor was defeated in a subsequent election, and the new prosecutor declined to press charges against the member of the family of a local cop] and moved to California, where he assisted his brother with cases developed by that brother's business, Birch Classic Investigations of Reseda, California. It was confirmed to me by a San Francisco newspaperman that Birch's involvement in the case on behalf of the defense had been confirmed, and that he'd questioned some sources in the SF/Oakland area.
We ran a story about it in the Midwestern-based newspaper chain for which I was then writing as a columnist [though that effort was interrupted by a period of service on a federal grand jury myself, during which I heard every permutation of every OJ and nasty lawyer joke known to western civilization.] The piece was also picked up by the now-defunct San Francisco internet magazine Bitey which ran the piece in their second or third issue as *The Other OJ Murders...*. I don't believe it's still available on-line, but the Wayback Machine might turn it up at bitey.com.
The other deaths are more-or-less documented if you know where to look, particularly since the OJ trial was recessed for one day so that Judge Ito and the other bailiffs could attend their fellow court guard's funeral. Likewise, followup interviews about what a swell guy Ron Goldman was were made difficult when his co-workers were themselves killed, one in the Aspen area, and another down south, as I recall. They didn't run far enough.
Further details available upon request, if you need 'em. And there's another I didn't mention that was also covered in the Bitey piece.
-archy-/-
If it is, it is the corrupt police department's fault. I understand everyone's desire to be protected from criminals, but in the long run it's more important to be protected from government.
I don't know that I buy your truism. I think in the end it's a toss-up.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
Audio: Former inmate Josiah Sutton talks about: