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 that the prosecutors and defense attorneys will request that Gary Alvin Richard be released on bond next week pending a further investigation. A jury convicted Richard of an attack on a nursing student in 1987 in a trial based largely on bood-type evidence from the Houston Police Department Crime Lab. The Chronicle reports that there were several problems with the conviction including the fact that the victim identified Richard seven months after the crime, there were conflicting conclusions by crime lab analysts, and a rape kit had been destroyed.

Bob Wicoff, Richard's attorney stated that he was troubled by the fact the Rape kit was not preserved:

“The real crime is that another rape kit has been destroyed or discarded,” Wicoff said. “The standards for preserving evidence were less stringent in 1987, but that is no excuse.” Without the rape kit, analysts at a California lab tested Richard’s body fluids and drew conclusions that Wicoff said establish his innocence. “He could not have been the source of the semen at the crime scene,” Wicoff said.

The new evidence derives from saliva samples that were preserved. The Crime Lab representative testified at trial that Richard was non-secretor, meaning his blood type was not shown in the saliva sample. However, upon retesting, it was found that Richard's saliva was secretor, showing his blood type. That blood type did not match the blood type left at the scene. Prosecutors say it is too early to say whether Richard should be cleared of the crime, even though they support his release. The District Attorney in Houston, Pat Lykos, is using Richard's case to call for an independent crime lab separate from the Houston Police Department. Four people have been exonerated due to errors made by the HPD Crime Lab

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