Wrongful Conviction Lawsuit Defense Blog : Wrongful Conviction Defense Lawyer & Attorney : Andrew M. Hale Law Firm

The Houston Chronicle's website, chron.com is reporting:

 A federal jury on Thursday awarded $5 million to a Houston man who spent 17 years in prison for a kidnapping and rape he did not commit, finding the city should pay for its “deliberate indifference” to problems at the crime lab whose false evidence secured the conviction.

Ain’t no amount of money is going to even my scale,” Rodriguez said after hearing the verdict. “I lost my dad and my girls have been through hell. I am grateful, but no money could replace what I lost.” “This verdict says what I think we all know to be true about the Houston Police Department crime lab,” said Barry Scheck, one of Rodriguez’s lawyers and a co-founder of the Innocence Project, which helped secure his release from prison. “They convicted innocent men and the city was indifferent.”

City Attorney Arturo Michel, whose office defended the city, said officials would take a close look at the trial transcript to review questions of evidence and evaluate how the city would assess the case if it were retried before deciding whether to appeal. “The jury was deadlocked on the issue of whether Lee Brown was deliberately indifferent,” he said. “That meant that they had difficulty coming to a conclusion on the evidence.”

A jury of five women and three men deliberated for about two days after hearing testimony from former Mayor Lee P. Brown, who was police chief in 1987, James Bolding, a crime lab manager who testified at Rodriguez’s trial and from Rodriguez himself.

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The Houston Chronicle is reporting:

"A federal judge ordered jurors to resume deliberating today after the jury indicated Wednesday that it was at an impasse in the case of George Rodriguez, who sued the city of Houston for $35 million for its role in his wrongful conviction. A Houston Police Department crime lab analyst gave false testimony in Rodriguez’s 1987 trial, and Rodriguez was imprisoned for more than 17 years before DNA evidence exonerated him. The jury of five women and three men sent U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore a note Wednesday afternoon, after about six hours of deliberations. The panel said it is at an impasse on the question of whether, as police chief, Lee. P. Brown was deliberately indifferent to the lack of training and supervision in the crime lab and the chance a violation of someone’s constitutional right to a fair trial would result. To get to this point, the jury had to already find that the crime lab employee’s testimony played a substantial role in Rodriguez’s conviction and that the city had an official policy or custom of allowing the crime lab personnel to be inadequately trained and supervised. If the jury can agree that Brown was indifferent to the constitutional risks, it has two more questions to address. It has to decide if the problems with the lab were “the moving force” behind the violation of Rodriguez’s rights and, if so, how much the city should pay Rodriguez." 

Refreshing to see the jury take their time and work through each claim.  Sympathy for Mr. Rodriguez should not be the reason to tag the City of Houston for millions. Plaintiffs must be held to their burden. Stay tuned for jury verdict....

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The Houston Chronicle reports: 

George Rodriguez’s lawyer asked a federal jury Monday to make the city pay “tens of millions of dollars” for the disgraced Houston Police Department’s crime lab’s pivotal role in the wrongful conviction that put his client behind bars for 17 years.

“What was taken away from him was his youth,” said attorney , whose Innocence Project works on behalf of convicts in similar circumstances. Rodriguez went to prison wrongly at age 26 and walked out at 43 to find his three daughters grown and his father dead, the lawyer said.

In opening statements Tuesday afternoon, Scheck told jurors about the loneliness, fear and depression his client suffered in prison after being wrongly convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl.

This happened, he said, because policy makers at the city of Houston were deliberately indifferent to rampant under funding, under staffing and a lack of supervision at the crime lab that created a high risk an innocent person could be convicted or the guilty one could go free.

“We will prove that a false and misleading serology report violated (Rodriguez’s) constitutional right to a fair trial,” Scheck told jurors in U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore’s court. A key piece of evidence in the criminal case was a pubic hair found in the girl’s underwear. A Houston police crime lab specialist testified falsely that the serology report on that hair eliminated another suspect, Isidro Yanez, but not Rodriguez. The case was tried before DNA evidence was used in court. DNA tests done 17 years later showed the hair belonged to Yanez.
Brown, Holmes blamed Scheck said evidence will show the lab specialist had a pattern of changing findings to match what the police and prosecutors wanted.

One of the policy makers Scheck blames is Lee P. Brown, the former Houston mayor who was police chief in 1987 when Rodriguez was convicted. Brown is scheduled to testify in the case, as is former Harris District Attorney John B. Holmes Jr., who was top prosecutor at the time of the trial. Rodriguez originally sued Harris County and others but dismissed all parties except for the city of Houston, who his lawyers say is most clearly culpable.

But Robert Cambrice, a lawyer for the city, told jurors that it was bad lawyering by the prosecutor and Rodriguez’s late defense attorney that led to the false conviction, not an unquestioned lie by a city employee. He said there was no city policy that led to the error in this case and under funding didn’t cause the employee to lie. “No city policy makers approved of unconstitutional fabrication of evidence,” Cambrice said. Cambrice asked the jury not to be overcome by the emotion surrounding Rodriguez’s ordeal.

The trail is likely to last two weeks. The five-woman, three-man jury heard from an assistant police chief late Tuesday about how the city didn’t closely investigate crime lab problems until after a 2002 local television report. That finally led to a $5 million independent investigation that highlighted Rodriguez’s case and others, she said.

It wasn’t until 2004 that a local court ruled Rodriguez should be freed because of the inaccurate trial testimony. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later vacated Rodriguez’s conviction. He has never received an official pardon and thus has received no compensation from the state.

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Click Here to Watch His Story:

According to news affiliate khou: 

A federal district judge has refused to dismiss a multi-million dollar civil lawsuit against the City of Houston, clearing the way for George Rodriguez’s claim that he was wrongfully imprisoned to go to trial Tuesday. His attorney, Mark Wawro, declined to comment except to say he is seeking compensation for what he has lost.

Court documents indicate that Rodriguez believes the city was complicit in his wrongful conviction by looking the other way as conditions in the city’s crime lab deteriorated over a period of several years.  The 11 News Defenders first exposed widespread problems with mishandled evidence, poor training and faulty test results five years ago. In 2004, a judge allowed Rodriguez to be released on bond after DNA testing cleared him in the kidnapping and rape of a 14-year-old girl in 1987.

Houston City Attorney Arturo Michel said the problems at the crime lab were not the source of the conviction. Instead, Michel points to the dishonest testimony of a crime lab supervisor. “I think what you have here is a person who was simply not honest,” Michel said. “It doesn’t matter how many funds you put into something and how good a program you have, you cannot guard against a person’s dishonesty.” “What we are going to show here is that you have someone who was lying on the stand and it was a tragic consequence,” he said.

On Wednesday, the Houston City Council will consider extending the contract with a private law firm that is representing the city in court. The City Attorney has already paid $50,000 to the law firm of Feldman & Rogers, and Wednesday’s vote would extend that to up to $200,000. Neither Michel nor Wawro would comment on exactly what financial relief Rodriguez is seeking in the case, but Michel said “they began with tens of millions of dollars that they would like the city to pay them in this process.”

Since then, Michel said, confidential discussions between the parties have been underway.  Rodriguez’s suit began with a wide range of defendants, including the City of Houston, Harris County and individuals involved in the case. The other defendants have either been dismissed from the case or have reached private settlements, Michel said.

11 News legal expert Gerald Treece says that Rodriguez’s legal claim his civil rights were violated is traditionally difficult to prove. “There has to be a conscious indifference by a policy or practice of the government,” he said. He added Rodriguez would have to prove city leaders knew the evidence that helped lead to the conviction was faulty and they “simply didn’t care." 

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