How Many Innocent People Has Harris County Sent to Prison?
Ronald Taylor is one of perhaps hundreds who've been locked up by our
local justice system
By Randall Patterson
published: October 09, 2008
Taylor was 33 years old at the time — a black man who had dropped out
of high school, served time in prison for cocaine possession, forgery
and burglary and was working construction, living alone in a small
house in the Third Ward. By many conventions, he was the perfect
suspect, and so it was that, having pulled on pants and a shirt, and
having rushed outside to see what was happening to the neighbor,
Taylor learned that the police had come for him. They pushed him into
the car and whisked him off to the station.
At the station, he was taken to a cubicle in the sex crimes division
and seated beside a detective named Julie Hardin. She began asking
about a kidnapping and a rape, and Taylor started realizing the
"nightmare situation" he was in: A married woman with whom he'd had a
one-night affair had explained the event to her husband as a matter
of force. Taylor tried to tell the detective otherwise, but he had no
lawyer and was soon booked into the Harris County Jail, where he was
held without bond.
While he was jailed, the detective continued to investigate him for
other crimes, with the result that, after the married woman's story
collapsed, Taylor found himself linked to another rape: A 39-year-old
neighbor of Taylor's had been assaulted in her bed with a knife
against her throat. Taylor claimed to know nothing of the crime, but
also couldn't remember where he had been at the time it occurred,
more than six weeks earlier. The detective, he recalls, "seemed just
determined that I belonged in prison," and so back to his cell he
went. The longer Taylor was jailed, the more disoriented he became,
until at last, he began to wonder if the detective was right. "Did I
do that?" he asked himself. Had he committed rape and simply
forgotten about it? But "no, uh uh," he concluded. "I was raised by a
woman." Rape was "just not something I could ever participate in."
So he began placing all of his hope for freedom in a trial, believing
a trial would bring reason and fairness to his case. Two years passed
before he got his day in court, however, and then "it was
unbelievable," he remembers. "I could go on and on with things that
don't make sense."
Taylor had expected his innocence to be established easily enough
through a DNA test. The culprit was believed to have left DNA behind
in a stain on the bedsheet, and this bedsheet had been taken into
evidence and mentioned at arraignment, Taylor says, as part of the
case against him. After Taylor provided his own DNA for comparison,
however, the stain magically disappeared — or at least, Maurita
Carrejo, an analyst in the Houston Police Department Crime Lab,
claimed to have found no ejaculate upon the sheet and so to have
conducted no DNA test.
Without such evidence, lawyers for the Innocence Project later wrote,
"the prosecution's case rested almost entirely on the eyewitness
testimony of the victim." Taylor had not understood how he had been
spotted at the scene of the crime, and it turned out that the victim
had identified him in stages. In her initial statement to police,
according to the Project, the victim had said that she was "unable to
see the perpetrator's features during the rape because it was dark in
her room." As time passed, however, her memory had steadily improved,
such that ten days after the attack, the victim was able to provide
Detective Hardin "a new statement with more details." And when, six
weeks out, Hardin showed up at the victim's house to offer a private
viewing of a videotaped lineup, the victim "remembered" yet more and
firmly named Taylor as her attacker. Now, at the trial, with the
assault some two years distant, the victim again "provided new
details," testifying that the darkness had actually been pierced by
floodlamps from outside, allowing her to see quite clearly her
rapist, Ronald Taylor.
The problems with this identification were quite handily dissected by
Taylor's court-appointed lawyer. He spoke of the discrepancies
between the victim's first statement and her last. He pointed out
that the lineup had not been conducted in a controlled environment,
and he even suggested the identity of a more likely culprit — a man
who had been identified to police by the victim's daughter as "Chili
Charlie." After that, Taylor was certain he would be released —
"there wasn't any evidence, man. There wasn't any evidence!" — but
once more, he had underestimated the ardor of the prosecution.
Detective Hardin testified that she had investigated this Chili
Charlie and had excluded him as a suspect. Furthermore, just as
Carrejo had claimed that the absence of semen was "not unusual" in a
sexual assault, so Detective Hardin went on to attest that it was
quite common for a victim to have an "ongoing remembrance of
details." Prosecutor Vanessa Velasquez characterized the initial
statement — when the victim said she was unable to see in the dark —
as only a matter of "some detail" missing. As the Innocence Project
quoted her closing argument, Velasquez admonished jurors not to set
Taylor free simply because of missing details.
"If you do that," Velasquez said, "if you do that today, you're
sending a message to every single juror that sits on any kind of rape
case in this county that if for whatever reason a victim doesn't
recall every specific detail, doesn't have a xerox memory, that they
should cut them loose...[And] you'll be sending a message to him and
to other rapists like him that if they don't ejaculate on somebody,
then you're going to be let go. You'll be found not guilty. Don't
reward him for that."
Indeed, the jurors did not reward Ronald Taylor for failing to
ejaculate on somebody, nor for escaping detection at the crime scene.
Instead, they found him guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, of
aggravated sexual assault.
_____________________
Many years later, a different analyst in a different laboratory would
test the bedsheet again, would find the semen stain that Carrejo had
not and would conduct the DNA comparison that would establish the
innocence of Ronald Taylor. Taylor would become just the third
convict from Harris County exonerated due to DNA testing, and Jeff
Blackburn of the Innocence Project of Texas would say that such cases
"open a window onto the justice system and allow you to see how
things really work." But all of this would occur many years later.
Being charged with rape was so humiliating to Taylor that he hadn't
wanted his family to attend the trial. After he was found guilty, he
called to tell his mother he had been sentenced to 60 years, and
"that might be the one thing that shook me," he says, "just listening
to my mom crying, 'no, no, no!' So I hurried up and got off the phone
with her."
He had earlier spent about five years in prison, but knew very well
that this experience would be different. When he arrived at the Gaza
West Unit in Beeville, the guards at intake stripped him, told him to
shut up and told him the rules. The most fundamental rule was that he
could never escape, and, realizing this, Taylor saw that he could
rage about just as much as he wished — could work himself into a
heart attack or a nervous breakdown. Could even kill himself, and no
one would care. It would be "just another day in prison" for everyone
else, he knew, and "don't nobody cry, just as long as there's a
reasonable explanation for what happened to the body."
He began mumbling the Serenity Prayer to himself. "Getting mad don't
do no good," he decided, and he tried not to ponder his innocence or
to consider how long he would be in prison, but only to tell himself,
"I'm in prison. You live here. This is your home."
As a new arrival, Taylor started out working in the fields, hacking
weeds with hand tools. Throughout the prison, there were "all these
little jobs" to do, and eventually he graduated to work inside. As
hard as he tried not to think about his life, Taylor couldn't help
noticing that the jobs taught no useful skills and didn't seem to
prepare prisoners in any way for life outside. The jobs also paid
nothing, and since "you have to have money to survive" in prison,
Taylor says, many prisoners learned "how to hustle" — how to make
their jobs pay. Kitchen workers stole sandwich fixings to sell later;
laundry workers pinched clean, starched clothes to auction off for
family visits.
Prison officials knew all about this black market, says Taylor, and
if you were too obvious in your game, they'd catch you and send you
back out into the fields. They never reduced the need for the black
market, though, and so prisoners would simply work their way back
inside and start hustling all over again, says Taylor, playing "a cat-
and-mouse game that continues until you get so good at your hustle,
you can get by without getting caught."
Taylor finally concluded that the prison system's claim that it
reforms criminal behavior was "a joke." "In essence," he says,
"they're training you to be a better criminal."
Because his family regularly sent him money, Taylor had no need to
develop a hustle of his own. He also had something that other people
wanted, in a place that was filled with predators. Guards try to stop
prison violence, Taylor says, but "it's just one of the things the
system can't protect you against." There were riots to establish the
momentary supremacy of one racial group over another, along with
countless smaller fights — in the cellblock, the eating area, the rec
yard, the shower — to determine who was going to eat whose food,
spend whose money, have sex with whom.
While murderers are "probably the only people who brag about what
they're in prison for," Taylor, as a convicted rapist, arrived near
the very bottom of the prison pecking order. Rape is a crime that
"tarnishes your reputation," he explains, and rapists are seen as
weak, as "perverted," as in need of killing. Taylor was only lucky he
was not weak at all but stood six feet tall and weighed 230 pounds.
"When it comes time to fight, you don't have to win," he knew, "but
you have to fight," or everyone will come after you "like a pack of
wolves."
Taylor claims he was never more than bruised in a fight. Afterward,
though, he would sometimes encounter the friends of his foe, whose
hostility encouraged him to seek friends of his own. Only after
Taylor managed to round up a few allies did he seem to find any
security in prison — and to begin enjoying the fights. In the
Coffield Unit near Palestine, where he spent most of his term, his
building had "all the windows busted out," he explains, and there
were cats walking around and birds flying through, and on those days
when the mosquitoes were bad and the temperature inside was over 100
degrees, fighting, he says, was "just a way to let loose." "If I had
something I wanted to get off my chest, we would just get it on,"
says Taylor.
Such displays seem to have contributed to his acceptance. What they
finally said in prison about Ronald Gene Taylor, according to Taylor,
was, "That fool there, he's crazy, but he ain't no rapist." Taylor,
in turn, came to see that "there are a lot of good guys in prison,"
and also many innocent men. He didn't think the innocent were so hard
to spot. Since the parole board makes admission of guilt a condition
for early release, most convicts would ultimately admit, "'Yeah, they
got me. I done this here,' or they'd say, 'I ain't do it like they
said I did it, but yeah, I did it.'" Always, though, "you got those
who'll tell you they didn't do it," he says. Year in, year out, they
would deny their guilt, and year in, year out, they would stay in
prison.
Some of them Taylor thought he saw trying to escape through the
prison law library — the barely literate men who came every day and
tried to make sense of law books, tried to write appeals, often from
memory because they couldn't afford the dollar a page they were
charged for their own court records. When the response to these
appeals came back from the court, it would often consist of a single
page — a denial without explanation. When the prisoners wrote to ask
for explanations, or file additional appeals, the court would often
bar them from filing anything further.
It was the same message all over: There was no way out. Taylor saw
men break against it — inmates barricaded themselves in their cells
and threw feces at anyone who tried to enter. He witnessed a man walk
to the end of the second row, climb a rail and dive into the
concrete. ("I didn't see him no more after that.") And everywhere,
there were the sedated men, drinking coffee and shuffling by — "got
this Thorazine shuffle." Taylor, though, seems to have survived by
not trying to break down walls or to fight his way out from the
library, but by encouraging people on the outside to fight for him.
He wrote to senators, to congressmen, to church and human-rights
groups. Mainly, he wrote his family. Taylor mailed about a letter a
day, and otherwise, tried not to think about time. "Because that's
when it will really hurt you," he explains, "when you go thinking
about the time and the date. If you don't worry about it, it takes
care of itself. You just let time pass. Just let it go."
There were few clocks or calendars by which to mark it. The prisoners
destroyed the clocks, and so Taylor knew the passage of a year mainly
by the holidays — "there's holidays in prison" — and the passage of
years he knew mostly by the changes he saw in himself — the weight he
gained eating pasta, rice and potatoes, the high blood pressure and
diabetes he developed. Eventually, more recent arrivals began saying,
"Man, you getting some years under your belt, ain't you?" "And then
it was like I woke up one day and, 'Damn, I been here 14 years.'"
It was about then that the Innocence Project, a national group
dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA
testing, got in touch. Taylor's stepfather, Herman Henderson, had
alerted them to the case, and they had found the bedsheet and only
needed a sample of Taylor's DNA for comparison. Taylor dared again to
hope; this time, his hopes were not dashed. The results brought back
"overwhelming proof," as Project lawyers phrased it, "that Mr. Taylor
was not the man who sexually assaulted Ms. A. on May 28, 1993."
Taylor is not the sort to jump for joy, but he was happy — "you can
believe that." He gave away his fan, his radio and his candy, and one
morning about a year ago, came through the gates and stepped into a
government car. The car transported him all the way back to Houston,
back to the people who loved him and to those who had sent him away.
_____________________
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."
Taylor, when he came home, met a similar reaction. At first, he was
confronted with a great, official show of remorse. Standing before
the judge who had sentenced him to 60 years — Judge Denise Collins —
he recalls being told that "she regretted any of this had happened."
Also, she wished him "luck." And Chuck Rosenthal, then the Harris
County district attorney, was also in court to apologize to "Mr.
Taylor." And when Taylor appeared before city council, as the
Innocence Project had arranged, he remembers that council members,
too, were "sorry it happened, and they were just trying to see what
they could do to make it better."
Taylor asked the council to "help people get some justice," but it
seems he had no pull. As profuse as the apologies were, they mainly
just underscored his case as an unusual event. His was only the third
DNA exoneration in Harris County, and while many people expressed
sympathy for his personal tragedy, others also considered Taylor's
case such an aberration that it could hardly reflect poorly on the
justice system. Some indeed viewed the low number of exonerations to
reflect only well upon the system — to be proof of the system's near-
infallibility. And still others — Rosenthal and Judge Collins among
them — saw Taylor's case as even a model of the system's success. For
the innocent man had been identified and set free, had he not? The
system had corrected its error. "I think the system worked in this
case," Judge Collins said recently. "I think we all do a great job
down here."
On its Web site, the Innocence Project declares to the contrary that
DNA cases are not aberrations at all "but arise from systemic
defects." Commonly among these defects are "eyewitness
misidentification, corrupt scientists, overzealous police and
prosecutors and inept defense counsel." Such weak points may be
"precisely identified" by examining any single exoneration case, and
considering Taylor's, Blackburn of the Innocence Project of Texas
thought he glimpsed a "pretty horrifying picture of Harris County."
It was the "very, very weak" identification of Taylor that helped
persuade the Project to arrange for a new DNA test. That test, in
turn, showed the troubles within the crime lab. Where the analyst
Maurita Carrejo had previously marked the bedsheet "negative" for the
presence of semen, an independent laboratory found "a fully
identifiable semen stain." According to a brief filed by the
Innocence Project, this stain yielded a "strong semen/spermatozoa DNA
profile," which in time not only freed an innocent man but also
identified the true rapist.
When the profile was entered into a DNA databank of criminal
offenders, a match was made to a man named Roosevelt Carroll. He,
too, had been one of the victim's neighbors, but his nickname was not
"Chili Charlie," as the victim's daughter had told police. It was
"Chilli Chetter." He bore such a remarkable similarity to the suspect
whom Detective Julie Hardin claimed at trial to have excluded that
lawyers with the Innocence Project could only conclude that "HPD may
indeed have failed to adequately investigate evidence pointing to
Carroll 14 years ago." After avoiding arrest, Carroll had gone on to
commit other crimes and was already a convicted sex offender when
authorities tracked him down in prison. Under the statute of
limitations, he could no longer be charged for the rape of Ms. A,
however, and was due to be released in 2010.
Taylor's case would seem less the model of success than the worst-
case scenario, but truly, no justice official had any excuse for
being surprised. By the time of Taylor's release, an independent
auditor had already uncovered a long history of incompetence and
corruption within the Houston Police Department Crime Lab. "Serious
problems" were found within the lab's serology and DNA units that
"posed major risks," auditor Michael R. Bromwich reported, "of
contributing to miscarriages of justice in extremely significant
cases." Thousands of convictions were thrown into doubt. Blackburn
thought there should be hundreds of DNA exonerations from the crime
lab alone. And the fact that there have been only a few in all Harris
County may be explained, it seems, as a matter of priorities.
Though the crime lab was the police department's own, the department
reacted with shock and dismay when the lab's failings were first
exposed in 2002. According to the auditor, the department quickly
went to work to improve the lab's testing capability — hiring new
supervisors and analysts, implementing new controls and training
programs. By June 2007, the auditor was able to write that the crime
lab had made "significant progress in shedding its troubled past."
Just a few months later, though, a Houston Chronicle editorial
complained that "city and county officials have been outrageously
lax" in examining cases of potential injustice from the lab.
Reviewing 850 serology cases processed by the crime lab between 1980
and 1992, the auditor found problems with 599. He recommended that
the district attorney's office and HPD attempt to locate the evidence
in these cases and offer to retest it, but for 419 of them, no
provision seems ever to have been made. An HPD spokesman says the
police department is "working with a couple of defense attorneys
regarding those cases" — but those attorneys have been charged only
with reviewing the 180 cases the auditor marked as containing a
"major issue." A panel of judges appointed them in the publicity
surrounding Ronald Taylor's release, and allocated resources
sufficient to pay them for part-time work. One of the lawyers, Bob
Wicoff, says he doesn't know the fate of the 419 cases but that with
the help of law student volunteers, his team has managed to review
about 70 of the 180 cases. They've identified 12 they believe
deserving of new DNA testing, but "it's kind of frustrating," says
Wicoff, because in seven of those cases, the police department has
informed them that evidence has been lost.
Here is "the only reason that Harris County is not engulfed in
exonerations," according to Blackburn: The district attorney, as the
chief law enforcement officer in the county, has not made
preservation of evidence from closed cases a priority. Indeed, a
spokesman for District Attorney Ken Magidson confirmed that
prosecutors typically ask defendants to waive their objection to
destruction of evidence, as part of every plea agreement.
Harris County thus has just three DNA exonerations on its record,
while Dallas County, which is more careful to preserve, has 20. Ours
are not aberrations in a sound justice system. As Blackburn said,
"they're the lucky ones whose evidence didn't get thrown away."
_____________________
Exonerees do not tend to live happily ever after, but following his
release, Taylor married a girlfriend who had waited for him all these
years, Jeannette Brown, and he moved to Atlanta to be with her. He
has started a lawn-care business and 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 everywhere has on job and credit and rental applications
explaining 14 missing years of his life.
Those who put him in prison have meanwhile gone on with their lives.
Detective Julie Hardin has retired. Her complaint history shows that
she was never disciplined in her career, save for one misconduct
allegation ("sustained") as a recruit.
Maurita Carrejo seems to have recovered from the incompetence she
displayed at the crime lab. A Google search reveals that she has
found more work in science, this time as a researcher with the
Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center.
And Vanessa Velasquez, who prosecuted Taylor, has carried her
standards of evidence to the judiciary. Presiding over the 183rd
State District Court, she is now presumedly addressed as "your honor."
Neither the victim nor the detective nor the crime lab analyst nor
the prosecutor has ever been in touch with Taylor since he was found
innocent. Carrejo and Velasquez also did not return calls for this
story; a police department spokesman claimed not to know how to
forward a message to Hardin.
"I ain't mad at them," Taylor says. "Don't do no good to get mad."
But he also can't help feeling that he's owed something here, and
just to be fair, he has decided to file a lawsuit. Taylor doesn't
know for what amount. He'll leave that to the jury. If the facts are
fairly presented, he says, they'll make the right decision.
"I believe that people are fair," says Taylor. "I don't know why I
still believe that, but I do."
http://www.houstonpress.com/2008-10-09/news/how-many-innocent-people- has-harris-county-sent-to-prison/
