DALLAS (AP) — A Dallas man who prosecutors say did not
commit a 1990 rape for which he served 12 years in prison should be
exonerated based on recent DNA testing he did not request, a judge
recommended Friday.
Dallas County Criminal District Court Judge
Gracie Lewis found 57-year-old Michael Phillips to be innocent, saying
his conviction should be vacated. The matter now goes to the Texas Court
of Criminal Appeals; it was not immediately clear when the court would
rule.
The National Registry of Exonerations said it’s the first
U.S. case it knows of in which an innocent defendant was identified as a
result of a systematic screening and DNA testing of past convictions by
a prosecutor’s office, rather than being initiated by a defendant or
the defendant’s representatives.
Dallas County District Attorney
Craig Watkins sought the exoneration after DNA testing identified
another man as the culprit in the rape of a 16-year-old girl at a motel
where both men lived.
Watkins has an ongoing project of reviewing
untested rape kits, even without defendants initiating the request.
Should the appeals court decide in Phillips’ favor, it would be the 34th
exoneration by Watkins’ Conviction Integrity Unit. On Friday, almost a
dozen other men who had been exonerated were in the audience to greet
him.
"This is a great day for Mr. Phillips but a terrible day for our justice system," Watkins said
during the hearing.
Phillips
served 12 years in prison after entering a plea deal that he said his
attorney advised him to take, fearing a jury would not side with a black
man accused of raping a white girl who picked him out of a photo
line-up. He was released in 2002, but his failure to register as a sex
offender later landed him back in jail for six months. He now lives in a
nursing home.
Phillips, who suffers from sickle cell anemia and
uses a wheelchair, spoke only briefly during the hearing, saying that he
was appreciative.
"I never imagined I would live to see my name
cleared," he said in a news release Thursday. "I always told everyone I
was innocent and now people will finally believe me."
After the
hearing, Watkins said: "Twelve years of his life are gone. His father
died not knowing that his son didn’t commit this crime. His mother died,
not knowing that he didn’t commit this crime. So there’s a lot. He’s
got brothers and sisters that are no longer living that had endured the
12 years that he spent in prison not knowing if he committed this
crime."
Police and prosecutors have long aided some exonerations
without having special conviction-review units, and many still do. But
since Watkins started his Conviction Integrity Unit in 2007, several
more prosecutors’ offices across the country have created such staff
teams or expert panels to review wrongful-conviction claims.
In
the Dallas County unit, DNA preserved by the Southwest Institute of
Forensic Sciences in sexual assault kits is tested. Because DNA samples
weren’t routinely collected from sexual assault suspects in 1990, there
was none from Phillips to compare to the profile from the semen in the
rape kit, Watkins said in a news release. But when the semen was put
into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, another person was identified
as the perpetrator.
That man’s DNA profile was added to the
database this year after he was sentenced to six months in jail for
burglary. The man has denied committing the rape, and the district
attorney’s office says the statute of limitations has expired.