(Dallas Morning News) - A Dallas County man is expected to be exonerated Tuesday in connection with a 1979 robbery and rape.
Cornelius Dupree Jr., the 21st man exonerated in Dallas County, will have served the longest prison term of any Texas inmate cleared through DNA evidence. He was paroled over the summer after serving 30 years of a 75-year sentence.
Dupree, 51, was convicted of aggravated robbery after two men abducted a man and woman on Dolphin Road in Dallas, said Paul Cates of The Innocence Project in New York.
::
(Dallas Observer - blog) - Three times since his 1979 rape conviction Cornelius Dupree Jr. has tried to get the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to re-hear his case, and three times he was denied. His most recent appeal came in September 2005 -- a pro se plea for help in which, once again, he maintained his innocence. In June 2006 the court denied his request for habeas corpus relief.
...
He was sentenced to serve 75 years, but was released on parole last July for good behavior. Ten days later, says Paul Cates, director of communications for The Innocence Project, tests came back revealing that Dallas County had put the wrong man in prison. Which is how Cornelius Dupree Jr. came to be the state's longest-serving innocent man.
...
Cates says that 10 days after Dupree was released in July, they discovered he was innocent.
:: |
|
(The Innocence Project) - "Cornelius Dupree spent the prime of his life behind bars because of mistaken identification that probably would have been avoided if the best practices now used in Dallas had been employed," said Barry Scheck, Co-Director of the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law. "Yet most counties in Texas do not have these best practices in place. This must be remedied in the next legislative session by the adoption of an eyewitness identification reform bill that had the votes needed for passage last session but not enough time to get enacted. Let us never forget that, as in the heartbreaking case of Cornelius Dupree, a staggering 75% of wrongful convictions of people later cleared by DNA evidence resulted from misidentifications."
...
On December 1, 1979, Dupree, 19, and a friend named Anthony Massingill were on their way to a party when they were stopped and frisked approximately two miles from the drive-in grocery where the crime began. Police recovered a handgun from Massingill and placed the two men under arrest. The following day, the female victim selected Dupree’s and Massingill’s photographs from a photo array. The male victim, however, was unable to identify either defendant in the same photo array. At the identification hearing and trial, which took place approximately four months after the attack, both victims identified Dupree and Massingill in court as their attackers. During the identification hearing, however, the female victim repeatedly misidentified a photo of Massingill as Dupree before finally identifying it as Dupree’s photograph. The victims are both white and both Dupree and Massingill are black.
Throughout the trial and since, Dupree has maintained his innocence. His defense at trial was misidentification. However, he and Massingill were both found guilty of aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon on April 3, 1980. Dupree was sentenced to 75 years in prison.
...
Massingill, who is represented by the Texas Wesleyan Innocence Project, will not be participating in tomorrow’s hearing but is expected to be declared innocent at a later date. At the same time Massingill was misidentified in the 1979 rape and robbery for which DNA has now proven his and Dupree’s innocence, he was also charged with and convicted of another rape for which he remains incarcerated. Massingill also maintains his innocence of the second crime, in which DNA testing is scheduled to begin shortly.
"Mistaken identification has always plagued the criminal justice system, but great strides have been made in the last three decades to understand the problem and come up with fixes like those being considered by the state Legislature that help minimize wrongful convictions," said Nina Morrison, Senior Staff Attorney at the Innocence Project. "We hope state lawmakers take note of the terrible miscarriage of justice suffered by Cornelius. When the wrong person is convicted of a crime, the real perpetrator goes free, harming everyone."
SB 121, authored by Sen. Ellis, and HB 215, authored by Rep. Gallego, would require all law enforcement agencies to adopt written policies for identification procedures, including lineups and photo arrays such as the one used in Dupree’s case. These procedures must be based on scientific research on eyewitness memory to increase accuracy and reliability and must include instructions to witnesses, documentation and preservation of witness statements and identification procedures as well as procedures for assigning lineup and photo array administrators to prevent opportunities to influence the witness. |