So it’s not just my perception that tuff on crime crowd aren’t usually the sharpest knives in the drawer. A couple of high-profile exonerations have left some overly-agressive prosecuters red-faced. One man in Dallas had 27 years of his life stolen away by a single victim’s mis-identification. Another man in New York state was freed after sloppy detective work put him away for 17 years.
Current Dallas County DA Craig Watkins
attributes the exonerations to a past culture of overly aggressive prosecutors seeking convictions at any cost. Watkins has started a program in which law students, supervised by the Innocence Project of Texas, are reviewing about 450 cases in which convicts have requested DNA testing to prove their innocence.
The Innocence Project of Texas was started, as an offshoot of Scheck and Neufeld’s Innocence Project in NY, by lawyer Jeff Blackburn to overturn the hundreds of poorly investigated, aggressively prosecuted cases that resulted in innocent people being unfairly imprisoned by the system.
“It is time we stop kidding ourselves in believing that what happened in Dallas is somehow unique,” said Jeff Blackburn, the founder of the Innocence Project of Texas. “What happened in Dallas is common. This is Texas.”
Jeff Blackburn helped me when I was but a wee punk in high school and found myself in hot water over participating in a xeroxene publication syndicate. It was basically an excuse to play with photocopiers and make art for me; this was also when I first discovered the power of the rant. We’d distribute our ‘zine’s around school and at football games (’cause we were in the band. Duh.) and the school admin got all bent out of shape about “unauthorized publications”. The local ACLU chapter connected us with Blackburn, who would flick the filter off another B&H as he lit it, bellowing, “Lemme tellya what the LAWR says:” before barrelling into one smoke-filled rant or another about civil liberties and oligarchic conspiracies. I never had any trouble from anyone at the school about it after Blackburn got involved, though.
He was also instrumental in blowing the lid off of the Tulia fiasco, revealing a corrupt detective who had personally railroaded dozens of people into prison on trumped up drug charges. If there’s ever been a lawyer in Texas with a clear sense of both reason and truth, it’s Jeff Blackburn.
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