DNA: Do Not Assume

The following is an excerpt from part two:

In its November 2008 issue, Texas Monthly published an article by Michael Hall about thirty-seven men who spent a total of 525 years in prison for crimes not committed. DNA technology has since proven them innocent. Of his ninety nine-year sentence, Charles Chatman spent twenty-six and a half years behind bars. He states, “It was like tunnel vision once they zoom in on one person. They were trying to get a quick conviction, satisfy society by just prosecuting somebody. That doesn’t do society no good to prosecute the wrong person.”

Another Texas prisoner, Carlos Lavernia, completed fifteen years of his mistaken sentence. He was identified in a lineup developed from photos fourteen months after the crime. The Anglo victim is positive that her assailant was a Cuban immigrant. In his report of prison experience, he recounts being in the shower when an inmate “stabbed me—twice, behind the ear and on the wrist. Guards saw me over there. They were saying, ‘Kill that motherfucker! Let him die!’” That exemplifies the intentions of those who locked him up in the first place. It typifies the discriminatory, hate filled aggressiveness of our society.

Anthony Robinson served ten of his twenty-seven years for rape. He says, “. . . you just don’t drive up and arrest people. . . I was thinking, ‘There is something really seriously wrong with this. This is some kind of sick, twisted joke . . . you just don’t take people to court and say, ‘Oh, this person raped me’—you gotta have some kind of corroborating evidence . . . I think what the prosecution basically decided was that we don’t need facts; we got a living victim here . . . No matter what I have in the way of proof, somebody’s always going to say that I got away with it. My thinking is that you can’t change that person.” After twenty-seven years, James Woodard was released based on DNA evidence. Texas Monthly’s account states that he “came up for parole numerous times but consistently refused to admit guilt, which could have won him early release.”