Legal News

Exonerations in Dallas County: Helping the Wrongly Convicted, and the DA

By Jennifer Forsyth

Is Craig Watkins, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, a hero or a media hound? Answers from people in Texas, and elsewhere, are all over the map. Here’s the WSJ profile on Watkins.

Watkins has generated a great deal of media attention for establishing a Conviction Integrity Unit and using DNA evidence to investigate more than 400 guilty convictions under his predecessors. Over the past 18 months, the unit has freed six inmates. (See here for a graphic of the exonerations.)

While a few other district attorneys have reviewed old convictions, none has given so many inmates their freedom. But Watkins is controversial because these efforts traditionally have been spearheaded by defense lawyers, not prosecutors. “I campaigned on this idea of change and smart on crime and the fact that innocent folks had gone to prison for crimes they didn’t commit,” said Watkins, who in 2006 became the first Democrat elected to the office in many years and the first African-American DA in Texas.

Every exoneration has called attention to wrongful convictions in general across the country and problems in Dallas County justice in particular. But each one also has added to Watkins’s fame, and raised questions about his political ambitions. His office has given phone interviews to reporters in Great Britain and Russia– and he’s set to have a major role in a two-hour documentary scheduled to air on the Investigation Discovery channel next year. Says Mari Woodlief, president of Allyn & Co., a Texas-based firm that’s been involved in numerous Republican campaigns: “I don’t know that it’s necessarily in the best interest of the county, but it’s definitely in his own best interest.”

His fame–some say grandstanding–has riled some peers. “Most of us consider the offices we run Conviction Integrity Units,” quipped Joshua Marquis, the DA of Clatsop County, Ore., who sits on the board of the National District Attorneys Association. “But what better way to get publicity in our society today than to be a prosecutor who goes against the conventional wisdom and says, “Oh dear, my predecessor convicted all these innocent people. I’m going to turn them loose.’ ”

Not everyone sees it that way. Perhaps surprisingly, Houston-based Justice for All, which describes itself as the most aggressive victims’ advocacy group in the country, says it has no problem with Watkins’s methods or his motives.”I think Mr. Watkins is running a very legitimate project and so far it’s proving to be legitimate and getting exonerations,” says William Rusty Hubbarth, vice president for legal affairs for Justice for All. “We can only sympathize with the people who have unjustly served their sentences.”

In a related matter, see this story for a glimpse at an unremorseful DA after DNA testing cleared six people in his jurisdiction. And for another take on Watkins, here’s the link to a story published Sunday by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Photo: WSJ

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 17, 2008 (boomark / email).