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New D.A. Rising?

Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins says he wants to get innocent people out of jail. Oddly, in Dallas County, this is a novel concept.On Wednesday, DNA testing exonerated Andrew Gossett of Garland, who had been serving a 50-year sentence for a 1999 sexual assault he didn’t commit. Within 24 hours, Gossett was in a courtroom shaking hands with new Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, who apologized and told Gossett his office would work on his application for a pardon and monetary compensation. Gossett, 46, walked out a free man.

“The new D.A.’s office gets credit for that,” says attorney Bruce Anton, who handled Gossett’s appeal. He was amazed at how fast his client was released. “Craig Watkins was there to speed up the process. I think the change in command makes all the difference in the world.”

My goodness, what a mess, can you imagine being in prison for 7 years and being innocent of the crime you have been put there for? We expect everyone in prison to say they are innocent but we don’t expect it to be true. Good for the new District Attorney Craig Walkins for doing the decent thing.

The office under former District Attorney Bill Hill repeatedly fought against post-conviction requests for DNA tests, even if inmates were willing to pay for the tests out of their own pockets.

“The old policy was to oppose it across the board,” says Anton. “If the guy’s arguably innocent, we shouldn’t block the tests.” He felt that Hill’s office was delaying Gossett’s request, first filed about five years ago. “I felt it was the policy to fight everything and concede nothing.”

You have to ask yourself why in the world Bill Hill’s office would have opposed these things across the board. Does it do anyone any good to have innocent men and women behind bars while the guilty are still walking free. Shouldn’t it be about bringing the perpetrators to justice as opposed to just being about the win. Is it really worth anything to defend a win ratio when its lies.

But the new boss thinks the old policy of opposing tests even when judges had approved them was nonsensical and unfair.

Well, yeah. It would seem that anyone would have come to the same conclusion but I guess we really can’t expect everyone to have real ethics and morals.

“We’re reviewing the policy and we’re going to change it,” Watkins says. “If it proves they committed the crime, hell, they’re where they should be. If not, then they need to be out. It’s not about convictions. It’s about doing the right thing.” Watkins has not hired anyone to take Rolater’s place.

The voters of Dallas County deserve a round of applause for voting Hill out and Watkins in. Sad, that it took so long but better late than never.

In the last year and a half in Dallas County, 11 inmates have been exonerated by DNA tests using more sophisticated techniques than were available at time of trial. Past district attorneys should be embarrassed that Dallas County now leads the nation in such exonerations. Vanessa Potkin, chief counsel of The Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School, says that “no other county in the country beats Dallas. It’s a county that beats out most states in the country. It’s an indication of a system that needs reform.”

So why is Dallas having such staggering numbers of the innocent put in prison? One clue: Potkin says that almost all of those exonerated were convicted with eyewitness testimony that proved to be wrong. “And these cases are recent, not from the ’80s,” she says.

You have to look at the source. Our justice system should work and innocent people should not be convicted. This is a systematic break down from the police through the prosecutors to the judges. I am really sorry to say that, I understand the police, DA’s, and judges work for very little but obviously they are doing something wrong if Dallas County has the most people exonerated of any county in the country. They need to set up new guidelines for lineups, prosecution with only witness testimony and the weight that judges allow juries to give to such testimony. There has to be real reform because obviously business as usual isn’t working.

Filed under: Andrew Gossett, Bill Hill, Craig Watkins, Dallas county, District attorney, Innocence, Innocence Project, exonerated, texas