"Two more Dallas County men cleared after serving decades for rape they didn’t commit," is the title of Jennifer Emily's Dallas Morning News report.
Raymond Jackson and James Williams returned to the same Dallas County courtroom Monday where they were wrongly convicted of rape nearly 30 years ago.
This time, though, court was in session to clear their names.
State District Judge Susan Hawk and District Attorney Craig Watkins shook their hands and apologized for the miscarriage of justice. Hawk declared the men “actually innocent” in the 1983 kidnapping, rape and shooting of a Canadian woman.
“To say I’m sorry is not enough,” Hawk said to the beaming Jackson, 67, and Williams, 54. “But I hope you both have very full and happy lives.”
They are the 31st and 32nd men to be exonerated in Dallas County since 2001. Dallas County has had so many exonerations because, unlike in other jurisdictions, evidence was preserved at the county crime lab, sometimes dating back to the late 1970s.
And:
An all-white jury sent the men, who are black, to prison based on eyewitness testimony, which has been proven notoriously unreliable in recent years. Most DNA exonerations in Dallas County and around the country involve the victims or witnesses wrongly identifying defendants as the perpetrator.
Jackson and Williams had alibis, but the jury did not believe them. They were sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Related posts are in the exoneration and wrongful incarceration indexes.
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