And Stephen's got Dallas D.A. Craig Watkins. I found what looks to my outsiders' eyes like some typical politickery (favorite headline: "No, You Do It: The GOP Finds Yet Another Candidate Willing to Run for D.A.", but I suspect he's here because of his work with the Texas Innocence Project. Here's something from a 2007 NPR report:
Dallas' new district attorney, Craig Watkins, says he will open his files to the Innocence Project and work with the group to examine hundreds of cases over the past 30 years. The goal is to see whether DNA tests might reveal wrongful convictions...
...{defense attorney Gary} Udashen says Dallas used to be like many other cities in Texas when it came to the DA's office. If it got a conviction, it defended that conviction to the bitter end, even if strong scientific evidence was later uncovered that the convicted was wrongly convicted.
This occurs most often in cases that are brought to trial built solely on the testimony of a single eyewitness, often the victim. But Udashen says that Watkins has decided that defending wrongful convictions is not going to be part of the job.
"Well, he has taken a completely different approach to questions of innocence... where he is going to cooperate with these innocence projects reviews of these cases, give them the information they need," he says. "And that active involvement in proving people innocent is something I've never seen a district attorney do before."...
His April 2008 interview in Reason, titled "Is This America's Best Prosecutor?" is worth reading, too. A sample:
reason: How should a prosecutor balance his time and resources between prosecuting present-day cases and looking for cases of wrongful conviction?
Watkins: Well, before we got here, there was no one working on innocence cases. So there was no balance, because no one was doing it. We just decided to start a whole new section of the office dedicated solely to innocence. And they’re not only looking for bad convictions, they’re also looking at what policies and procedures we can put in place to keep them from happening in the future. So we aren’t really taking time away from prosecutions. We’ve just added positions that didn’t exist before.
In related news, I found this Chicago Tribune article from this past weekend:
While the debate over capital punishment rages anew in Texas, new inmates going to death row have hit a 35-year low as prosecutors push for fewer death sentences and, many believe, juries have become less willing to give them.
Various factors have contributed to a stark decline in death sentences.
The biggest game-changer appears to be the introduction of life without parole as an option for juries in 2005, according to several prosecutors and defense lawyers....
...But because of the state's growing list of exonerations via DNA evidence and other questionable convictions, some argue that juries are simply less willing to send someone to death row. Democratic state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., the author of the life-without-parole law, said prosecutors are trying to blame it for their troubles getting Texans to trust a scandal-ridden system.
"It isn't life without parole that has weakened the death penalty," Lucio said. "It is a growing lack of belief that our system is fair."...
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