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Houston man clears final legal hurdle to complete exoneration
Posted: January 15, 2008 5:12 pm
Ronnie Taylor, an Innocence Project client who spent 12 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit before he was released in October, was finally cleared yesterday when the Houston District Attorney dropped the indictment still pending against him. Taylor was proven innocent by DNA testing on evidence from the crime scene, which matched another man already in prison. He is the 212th person to be exonerated nationwide by DNA testing, and the 30th in Texas.
Read the full story here. (Associated Press, 01/15/08)
Before Taylor was arrested in 1993, he was engaged to be married to Jeanette Brown. After his release, Taylor moved to Atlanta and married Brown, and the couple now lives in Georgia.
Read about Taylor and Brown’s wedding here.
Tags: Ronald Taylor
DNA testing suspended as more problems emerge at Houston crime lab
Posted: February 1, 2008 5:05 pm
The Houston Police Department again closed its DNA testing section last week after the lab’s chief resigned due to problems with the accreditation of lab analysts. Vanessa G. Nelson, the former chief of the Houston Police DNA lab, submitted her resignation earlier this month after it was revealed that she had improperly coached analysts on open-book proficiency tests. This is the second time in recent memory the lab has closed due to scandal. The Houston Police Department was closed from 2002 to 2006 after major flaws in testing procedures were revealed. An independent audit completed last year found that hundreds of convictions had been based on testing that was incomplete or may have been flawed.
And a Houston Chronicle article this week revealed that Nelson, the departed lab chief, had been hired subsequently by the state to oversee DNA testing in a Texas Department of Public Safety lab.
State Rep. Kevin Bailey, who sat on a committee that investigated problems in the DPS labs in 2003, said he was troubled that the agency would hire Nelson before the HPD cheating investigation was complete.
"It is shocking, to say the least, that they would hire someone who was giving out test answers," the Houston Democrat said. "The integrity of these DNA labs is so critical. Their work has life-and-death consequences."
Read the full story here. (Houston Chronicle, 01/29/08) DNA testing has overturned three wrongful convictions caused, at least in part, by faulty testing at the Houston Police Department Crime Lab. Innocence Project client Ronnie Taylor was released late last year after DNA tests proved that he didn’t commit the rape for which he had served 12 years in prison. His conviction was based partly on faulty tests conducted at the Houston lab. Read more about last week’s lab closure here.
Download the full report of the external lab audit completed last year.
Tags: Texas, George Rodriguez, Josiah Sutton, Ronald Taylor
Texas exoneree says Governor's pardon is the key to a new life
Posted: June 20, 2008 3:12 am
Ronnie Taylor was released from Texas prison eight months ago after serving 12 years for a rape he didn’t commit. This week, he received a pardon from Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and he said this step will finally let him get started with his life.
"It's been hard to get restarted," Taylor said in a telephone interview from Atlanta. "Little things, like filling out a job application or renting an apartment are hard when you have to say you are a convicted felon. Now, I am officially a free man. I am so relieved."Taylor was convicted of a 1993 rape in Houston after an analyst from the Houston Police Department Crime Lab incorrectly told jurors that no semen was discovered on the victim’s bedsheet, despite a large damp spot identified by police immediately after the crime. After the Innocence Project accepted his case, lab analysis showed that there indeed was semen from the perpetrator at that spot. DNA testing not only cleared Taylor, but led to the identity of the real perpetrator, who was briefly a suspect at the time of Taylor’s arrest.
Read the full story here. (Houston Chronicle, 06/20/08)
Watch Ronnie Taylor tell his story in his own words in an Innocence Project video on Texas exonerations.
Tags: Ronald Taylor
Ronnie Taylor’s long road to freedom
Posted: October 10, 2008 3:55 pm
Nine months after he was exonerated in Houston, Ronnie Taylor is building a new life. He lives in Atlanta and is married to his longtime girlfriend, Jeanette Brown, who waited for him while he served 14 years behind bars. He owns his own lawn care business.
(He) says that "everything's going lovely, man," and only when you press him will he tell you about his medical problems, his lack of health insurance, his debt and the trouble he has on job and credit and rental applications explaining 14 missing years of his life.An article in the Houston Press this week catches up with Taylor and looks back at the long, hard years he spent in prison, waiting for a chance to prove his innocence. The article also examines the state of criminal justice in Houston and statewide in Texas, and finds that reforms haven’t moved fast enough to prevent future injustice like Taylor’s.
Texas has experienced 34 DNA exonerations — more than any other state — and "these compounding exonerations," as State Senator Rodney Ellis says, "are clear and convincing evidence that our criminal justice system is broken." Time after time, Ellis has pushed reforms to prevent the conviction of innocent people, but most of these proposals have been defeated, mostly on the grounds that they're unnecessary. Ellis is baffled. Only in criminal justice, he says, do "you get a knee-jerk reaction that the system is just fine and improvements aren't needed. At times, it seems there's more of an effort in trying to ignore mistakes than any real effort to address them."Watch a video interview with Ronnie Taylor here.
Read the full story here. (Houston Press, 10/09/08)
Tags: Ronald Taylor
The Texas Exonerated
Posted: October 27, 2008 4:05 pm
A feature in this month’s Texas Monthly profiles 37 people cleared with DNA testing after serving a combined 525 years in prison.
The first thing you notice is the eyes—they all have the same look in them, the look of men accustomed to waking up every morning in a prison cell. These 37 men spent years, and in some cases decades, staring through bars at a world that believed they were guilty of terrible crimes. But they weren’t. Each was convicted of doing something he did not do. It’s hard to characterize the look in their eyes. There’s anger, obviously, and pride at having survived hell, but there’s also hurt, and a question: “Why me?”Visit the Texas Monthly website for video of a photoshoot with 21 exonerees and audio slideshows telling the stories of more than a dozen.
The short answer is simple: People make mistakes. Most of these cases share a common story line: A woman, usually a traumatized rape victim, wrongly identifies her attacker. Sometimes her testimony is backed by rudimentary serology tests. Sometimes the cases are pushed too hard by aggressive police officers or prosecutors.
Tags: James Giles, Entre Nax Karage, Carlos Lavernia, Brandon Moon, Christopher Ochoa, Anthony Robinson, Ronald Taylor, Patrick Waller, James Waller, Gregory Wallis
Houston crime lab implicated in another possible wrongful conviction
Posted: April 28, 2009 5:00 pm
Twenty two years after being wrongfully convicted for a rape and robbery in Texas, a Houston man may be released on bail this week on the heels of new DNA tests proving his innocence.
Gary Alvin Richard was arrested for the January 1987 attack of a 22-year-old nursing student and was convicted based largely on evidence processed by the Houston Police Department crime lab, the same lab that came under fire in 2002 after local reports raised questions about the quality of DNA testing. According to the Houston Chronicle, there are a number of problems with Richard’s case:
The victim identified him some seven months after the attack. HPD crime lab analysts came to conflicting conclusions about the evidence, but reported only the results favorable to the case. Physical evidence collected in what is known as a “rape kit” has been destroyed, a victim of poor evidence preservation practices, leaving nothing for DNA testing now.During his original trial, HPD crime lab supervisor James Bolding testified that Richard was a non-secretor, meaning that analysts would not be able to determine Richard’s blood type through his body fluids. However, while tests done last week confirmed that semen from the rape kit came from a non-secretor, it also showed that Richard is a secretor. Therefore, the semen found on the rape kit could not be his.
Read the full story here. (Houston Chronicle, 4/24/09)
While Richard’s defense claims that the blood tests prove his innocence, prosecutors aren’t as sure. The Houston District Attorney’s office concedes that Richard should be released on bail, but has said that it is too early in the reexamination process to clear Richard of all charges. Three Harris County men have already been proven innocent through DNA testing after mistakes at the HPD crime lab led to their wrongful convictions: Josiah Sutton, George Rodriguez and Ronald Taylor.
Read more about the history of the Houston crime lab scandal in previous blog posts.
Tags: Texas, George Rodriguez, Josiah Sutton, Ronald Taylor, Evidence Preservation, Access to DNA Testing
The Cost of Faulty Forensics
Posted: January 13, 2010 6:40 pm
Two years ago this week, Ronald Gene Taylor (left) was officially exonerated of a Texas rape after serving 12 years in prison.
DNA testing could have been conducted before his trial, but an analyst from the Houston Police Department Crime Lab testified incorrectly that there was no biological evidence to test. It would be more than a decade before this error was corrected.
Early in the morning of May 28, 1993, a woman awoke in her Houston apartment to find a man holding a knife to her neck. She was unable to break free, and the man raped her on her bed before fleeing the apartment. During the investigation, Houston police officers collected the sheet from the victim’s bed, specifically noting a wet spot. Although the woman initially said she could not identify the perpetrator, she was allowed to watch a videotaped lineup at her home nearly six weeks after the crime, where she picked Taylor, after suddenly remembering that the perpetrator had a missing tooth. In 1995, Taylor was convicted by a jury of sexual assault and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
The Innocence Project took on his case in 2006 and sought DNA testing on the same sheet that reportedly contained no evidence to test. Semen was identified on the sheet and, and the results didn’t only exonerate Taylor, they also pointed to the identity of the real perpetrator.
Taylor’s case underlined ongoing forensic problems in Houston. In 2002, the HPD Crime Lab came under scrutiny for faulty forensic practices and the DNA lab was shut down while an independent review was conducted. The review revealed startling deficiencies in the DNA unit, ranging from poor documentation to serious analytical and interpretive errors that resulted in highly questionable results through the use of inaccurate and misleading statistics.
According to the review, standard operating procedures “consisted of procedures and reference materials cobbled together over time without periodic re-evaluation and reorganization. There were few technical reviews of analysts’ work, including review of their test results, interpretation of data, and reporting.” The lack of oversight likely resulted in serious misconduct, including at least four cases of fabrication of scientific results, called “drylabbing,” which the report called the “the most egregious form of scientific misconduct that can occur in a forensic science laboratory,” and a “hanging offense” in the scientific community. Read the full independent report here.
Although the Houston lab has made strides since 2002, such as receiving national accreditation in 2006, it still has a long way to go. The lab closed again in 2008 after its chief resigned over staff training problems. Recently, new questions have been raised about the lab’s fingerprinting procedures. Taylor is one of three people exonerated through DNA testing after being wrongfully convicted based on faulty tests from the lab, and another pending case could lead to an exoneration.
Meanwhile, in the two years since his release, Taylor has begun to build a new life. Shortly after being freed, he married his long-time fiancée, Jeanette Brown. The couple lives in Atlanta.
Other Exoneration Anniversaries This Week:
Larry Fuller, Texas (Served 19.5 years, Exonerated 1/11/07)
Gregory Wallis, Texas (Served 17 years, Exonerated 1/10/07)
Ricardo Rachell, Texas (Served 5.5 years, Exonerated 1/14/09)
Rickie Johnson, Louisiana (Served 25 years, Exonerated 1/14/08)
Dale Brison, Pennsylvania (Served 3.5 years, Exonerated 1/14/94)
Tags: Ronald Taylor