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"I’ve exonerated him."; Hearing now. (Plaintiffs should read.)
Topic Started: Feb 5 2009, 03:17 PM (676 Views)
Tidbits

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/courts/entries/2009/02/05/lubbock_da_in_austin_but_not_f.html

Quote:
 
The district attorney from Lubbock County is in Austin today but said he won’t attend an extraordinary hearing in state District Judge Charlie Baird’s court scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. involving a wrongful conviction in a 1980s rape case in Lubbock County.

Lubbock County Criminal District Attorney Matthew Powell is the man who ordered DNA testing in the case that corroborated years of confessions to the 1985 rape of Texas Tech student Michele Mallin by Texas prison inmate Jerry Wayne Johnson. Fellow Tech student Timothy Cole was convicted based on Mallin’s faulty identification and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Cole died in prison in 1999, and his family is joining with Mallin in Baird’s court in the hopes of officially clearing his name.
After a Lubbock court denied a request by the Innocence Project of Texas to take up the case the group went to Baird.

Powell, who became Lubbock district attorney in 2005 and before that was first assistant for five years, said he is in Austin to recruit prosecutors at University of Texas School of Law job fair. Innocence Project of Texas lawyer Jeff Blackburn said he has invited Jim Bob Darnell, the West Texas judge who prosecuted the case against Cole, to the hearing but has not heard back. Darnell could not be reached.

Reached by phone, Powell said he does not believe that the hearing is the proper setting for the case.

“In my mind, I’ve exonerated him,” Powell said, referring to the DNA testing he ordered last year that linked Johnson to Mallin’s rape. “This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

“Do I blame him (Blackburn) for doing what he is doing? If it was my son I would do everything in my world to clear his name but I don’t think I have to be there.”

Powell said Johnson, who is serving a life term and a 99-year term for two rapes committed in 1985, would not be charged in Mallin’s rape because the statute of limitations has run out.

The case against Cole rested on Mallin’s identification of him in photographic and live line-ups and in court. Blackburn has called those lineups “suggestive” and the Innocence Project is pushing for state legislation that sets a standard for how police administer lineups.

When asked who was to blame for Cole’s conviction, Powell did not include police and prosecutors.

Where it went wrong is you had a victim who picked him out of a lineup,” he said.

He said he has not conducted a review of the case to see what went wrong.

“I didn’t think it was necessary,” he said. “This is the greatest system in the world but it is a system built on people and people make mistakes.”


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Tidbits

on Baird:

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A629430

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Even amid the stack of pending cases, Baird is relaxed, his manner easy. Consider a typical case – a plea bargain for burglary or drug possession, for example. Baird reads over the case file before him, hears what offer the state will make to dispose of it – and then stops, peers over the top of his reading glasses, and fixes his gaze on the defendant. He addresses him by name.

"Tell me about your life," he says.

Baird asks about schooling, about work history, family life, and more often than not, whether the defendant believes he has a drug or alcohol problem. Baird connects with the people that come before him – he remembers their names, the details of their cases, and the details they share with him about their lives. And he concentrates on connecting people and resources – substance-abuse treatment, work-force programs. In short, Baird actually gives a shit. "My mind was blown when I [first] saw him on the bench here," says veteran criminal attorney Keith Hampton. "There's this kid standing there, and the first thing out of [Baird's] mouth is, 'I'm proud of you.' And he keeps going," praising the young man for his accomplishments while on probation. When Baird finished, Hampton recalls, the kid looked up and "spontaneously says, 'Judge, can I shake your hand?' And I thought, oh my God – that doesn't happen. You don't see that connection." It is impressive, say Baird's supporters, that in an overburdened system, Baird still deals with people and not simply with case numbers.



Edited by Tidbits, Feb 5 2009, 03:44 PM.
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Tidbits

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/02/03/0203exonerate.html
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In 1985, Michele Mallin was abducted from a church parking lot near Texas Tech University in Lubbock, driven outside of town and raped.

In photographic and live lineups, she identified fellow Tech student Tim Cole as her attacker. That sent Cole to prison, where he died of complications from asthma in 1999 at the age of 39.

DNA tests and repeated confessions from another suspect — who is serving life in prison for two other rapes in Lubbock in 1985 — have since shown that Cole was probably innocent.

On Thursday, Mallin will join members of Cole's family in an Austin courtroom to try to officially clear Cole's name.

"It is the right thing to do," said Mallin, now 44 and living in Baytown.

Lawyers for the Innocence Project of Texas, which is representing Mallin and Cole's family, said if state District Judge Charlie Baird declares that Cole did not rape Mallin, it will be the first posthumous DNA exoneration by a Texas court. Innocence Project lawyer Jeff Blackburn of Amarillo asked Baird, a sometimes unconventional former Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judge, to take up the case last year after a court in Lubbock refused.

Since 1994, 35 former Texas inmates — all living—have been exonerated in Texas courts by DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project of Texas. About 80 percent of those were convicted at least in part by witness misidentification, said Natalie Roetzel, Innocence Project's executive director.

The Innocence Project of Texas is hoping to use the case not only to clear Cole but to push for laws strengthening witness identification procedures. The group will hold a Capitol news conference Friday asking for legislation formalizing those procedures, expanding compensation for wrongfully imprisoned people to include surviving family members and making other criminal justice reforms.

Though there is no direct way under Texas law to seek a formal exoneration for someone who has died, Baird said that when the courts have committed a wrong, Texas law states that the courts shall remedy that wrong.

"I am disappointed that the courts in Lubbock County did not think that there was sufficient basis to conduct a hearing," Baird said. "I think it is incumbent upon a judge somewhere in Texas to pick up this case and give the Cole family a fair hearing and to restore the good name of their child."


Quote:
 
In May, Mallin, who is married and pursing the bachelor's degree that she abandoned in 1985, got a call from a Lubbock prosecutor.

"I was just beyond shocked; I was crying," she said. "This man died in prison for something he never did, and I was the one who sent him there."
Edited by Tidbits, Feb 5 2009, 03:49 PM.
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Quasimodo


“In my mind, I’ve exonerated him,” Powell said, referring to the DNA testing he ordered last year that linked Johnson to Mallin’s rape.

http://www.newsobserver.com/122/story/423471.html


"How does DNA exonerate you? It's either a match or there's not a match," Nifong said. " ... If the only thing that we ever have in this case is DNA, then we wouldn't have a case."


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Bill Anderson
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Murdered by the State of Texas, which would be a fitting epitaph for this young man. Yet, the people who sent him there do not have to pay a dime. No one loses his job, no one has to face the bar of justice, nothing. It seems that the woman who had the police and prosecutor manipulate her and her testimony (so they could get credit for "solving" the case) is the only one in this sorry affair with a conscience. No one else who worked so hard to convict this young man gives a damn at all. Another day at the office.

I am sick of this. I am sick of watching prosecutors, police, and judges constantly get away with this evil. I am sick of watching the lapdog press hang onto the every word of these professional liars and treat the Nifongs of the world as though they were giving us the Oracles from the Gods.

Yet, I also know there is nothing we can do. They are in charge, and they have absolute legal immunity for their actions. Even trying to make these monsters accountable means we have to use huge amounts of our own resources, while they are able to use tax dollars to defend themselves.

And the more these liars are exposed, the more they lie -- and get away with it.

:bill:
Edited by Bill Anderson, Feb 6 2009, 12:28 PM.
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Kerri P.
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http://www.wral.com/news/national_world/national/story/4488195/
Judge moves to clear dead man of rape conviction

By JIM VERTUNO
Associated Press Writer
Posted: Today at 6:33 p.m.
Updated: 1 minute ago

AUSTIN, Texas — A judge on Friday ordered the exoneration of a man who died in prison while serving time for rape after recent DNA tests showed another man committed the crime. State District Judge Charles Baird also ordered Timothy Cole's record expunged, calling it the "saddest case I've ever seen."

Cole was convicted of raping a Texas Tech University student in Lubbock in 1985 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He died in 1999 at age 39 from asthma complications.

DNA tests in 2008 connected the crime to Jerry Wayne Johnson, who is serving life in prison for separate rapes. Johnson testified in court Friday that he was the rapist in Cole's case and asked the victim and Cole's family to forgive him.

"I'm responsible for all this. I'm truly sorry for my pathetic behavior and selfishness. I hope and pray you will forgive me," Johnson said.

The Innocence Project of Texas said Cole's case was the first posthumous DNA exoneration in state history.

"I have his name," Cole's mother, Ruby Cole Session, said after the hearing. "That's what I wanted."

Cole and his relatives for years claimed he was innocent, but no one believed them until evidence from the original rape kit was tested for DNA. The Innocence Project pressed for a hearing to start the process of clearing Cole's name.

snip....
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Bill Anderson
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Texan who died in prison cleared of rape conviction

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/06/texas.exoneration/index.html

(CNN) -- A Texas district court judge Friday reversed the conviction of a man who died in prison nearly a decade ago, almost two decades into a prison sentence for a rape he swore he did not commit, CNN affiliate KXAN reported.

Timothy Cole was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for the 1985 rape of 20-year-old Michele Mallin. He maintained his innocence, but it was not confirmed by DNA until years after his 1999 death, when another inmate confessed to the rape.

In the courtroom of Judge Charlie Baird Friday afternoon, Mallin, now 44, faced Jerry Johnson, the man who confessed to the rape.

"What you did to me, you had no right to do," she told him angrily, according to Austin's KXAN. "You've got no right to do that to any woman. I am the one with the power now, buddy."

~snip~

But, here is the kicker, and why this case makes me angry:

The next day, police investigators showed Mallin pictures of possible suspects. She chose a picture of Cole and said he was her attacker. She later identified him in a physical lineup, according to the Innocence Project of Texas.

"I was positive," she said. "I really thought it was him."

But there was one detail: Mallin told police her attacker was a smoker. "He was smoking the entire time."

Cole, who suffered from severe asthma, "was never a smoker," said his brother, Cory Session. "He took daily medications [for asthma] when he was younger."


"He was the sacrificial lamb. To them, my brother was the Tech rapist, there was no backtracking. It was the trial of the decade for Lubbock."

The "Tech rapist" attacked four women other than Mallin -- abducting them in parking lots near campus and driving them to a vacant location, where he would rape them and flee on foot, according to the Innocence Project of Texas. The rapist "terrorized" the Texas Tech campus in the mid-1980s, the organization said.

~snip~

We are not talking about an insignificant alibi. If this young man was not a smoker, then the prosecutor should have seen immediately that he was pursuing the wrong person. My sense is that the prosecutor (who, like Ronald Stephens, is now a judge) was more interested in getting a conviction than "solving" a case.

There is no excuse for this. None. Yet, the former prosecutor who, in my opinion, murdered Timothy Cole, will collect his judge's salary, and sentence people -- and maybe people who are innocent but wrongly convicted -- to prison. This is wrong. This "judge" should not be permitted to step into a courtroom, except if he is wearing an orange jump suit and handcuffs. He is a murderer, and he was just as much a criminal as the "Tech Rapist," and maybe even more so.

If you want to know why I think most prosecutors are out-and-out criminals, read this article and you will understand. Michael Nifong was not an outlier; never forget that this pathological liar was a "respected" prosecutor in North Carolina before the outcome of the lacrosse case. Please do not tell me that he was a great guy who simply made some wrong choices; a man does not turn into a sociopath overnight. He always was a lying sociopath, and the criminal "justice" system was a perfect place for this liar to work.

Nifong just got caught, that's all. And even after he was caught, he still had plenty of supporters. It just makes me sick.

:bill:
Edited by Bill Anderson, Feb 6 2009, 10:43 PM.
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teddy bear

Bill...Here is a case that should make anyone sick. Cindy Sommer, convicted of killing her Marine husband with a fatal dose of arsenic, spends 800 days in jail. looses her kids..and, when it turns out that the forensic tests were bogus, the prosecution has to drop the charges. Does the San diego DA ,Bonnie Dumanis, apologize? Nope. Instead she cavalierly says "Justice was done today. This is how the system is supposed to work" What!! An innocent women is convicted of murder by faulty lab work, prosecutorial misconduct, and an gullible, sexist jury, and the system worked. Even now, the DA refuses to drop charges with prejudice so as to help Ms Sommer in getting her children back. Case was recently featured in " Snapped " tv show on Oxygen channel.
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Bill Anderson
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teddy bear
Feb 8 2009, 04:30 PM
Bill...Here is a case that should make anyone sick. Cindy Sommer, convicted of killing her Marine husband with a fatal dose of arsenic, spends 800 days in jail. looses her kids..and, when it turns out that the forensic tests were bogus, the prosecution has to drop the charges. Does the San diego DA ,Bonnie Dumanis, apologize? Nope. Instead she cavalierly says "Justice was done today. This is how the system is supposed to work" What!! An innocent women is convicted of murder by faulty lab work, prosecutorial misconduct, and an gullible, sexist jury, and the system worked. Even now, the DA refuses to drop charges with prejudice so as to help Ms Sommer in getting her children back. Case was recently featured in " Snapped " tv show on Oxygen channel.
Typical prosecutor, even when found to be wrong cannot admit having falsely charged someone. The problem is that these prosecutors are beholden to no one. They are little dictators, and there is no way to get them under control, as they are a law unto themselves.

:bill:
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