Man free after serving 14 years for crime he didn't commit
Houston Chronicle
Fourteen years of wrongful imprisonment ended today when Ronald Gene Taylor emerged from the Harris County Jail carrying his only belongings, a Bible, court documents and toiletries in an orange mesh bag.
Taylor embraced his family who had waited for about two hours after a hearing this morning for his release.
"I always believed this was coming one day," Taylor said. " I'm just glad to see my family. It ain't really sunk in yet."
Taylor and his lawyers left the Harris County Jail immediately after his release at 1:30 p.m. Taylor later addressed Mayor Bill White and the City Council about his ordeal.
"I think there is a lot of people who have the same problem I had,'' he told the standing-room-only crowd in the City Council chamber. "There are a lot of people who can't get help because they don't have the finances. Something needs to be done."
Taylor, 47, was sentenced to 60 years in prison for a 1993 rape, in part on faulty evidence from the Houston Police Department's troubled crime lab. New DNA tests announced last week cleared him of that crime.
In state District Judge Denise Collins' court this morning, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said: " I want to apologize to Mr. Taylor."
Taylor appeared in an orange jail jumpsuit in the hearing before Collins, who told him: "I thought you would be in street clothes."
"I did, too," Taylor said.
Taylor's mother and stepfather attended the hearing, but Taylor's fiancee, who has believed in and waited for him all these years, could not be there.
"I'll be thinking of him and wishing I was there," said Jeannette Brown, whose obligations as a nursing assistant and student will keep her from making the trip from her Atlanta home to Houston. "Waiting to see him is so hard, but I have to."
Taylor was accused in 1993 of raping a woman who was attacked while sleeping in her Third Ward home. Police showed the woman a video lineup, which included Taylor because a neighbor had seen him in the area that night, and she identified him as her attacker.
The woman's testimony served as the primary evidence at trial. An analyst from the troubled Houston Police Department lab testified that it was impossible to offer DNA evidence because a sheet from the crime scene contained no semen that could be analyzed.
Twelve years to the day later, the sheet that HPD originally tested was sent to a private lab for re-examination at the request of the New York-based legal clinic The Innocence Project, which had taken Taylor's case.
The private lab found semen that yielded a DNA profile but not Taylor's.
The analysis by ReliaGene Technologies identified the DNA profile of Roosevelt Carroll, a felon twice convicted of rape who is serving a 15-year sentence in a Texas prison for failing to register as a sex offender. Carroll lived within a mile of the victim's home.
Taylor is the third man exonerated after being convicted with faulty work from the Houston Police Department crime lab. The lab came under scrutiny in 2002, when news reports and an audit exposed shoddy work and poorly trained personnel, touching off a scandal that cast doubt on thousands of convictions and continues today.
Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said he will work for Taylor's quick release and pardon. Assuming Taylor receives a pardon based on his innocence, he could receive upwards of $700,000 $50,000 for each year of incarceration. Rosenthal cannot prosecute Carroll because the deadline for filing charges in the case has passed.
Taylor has said he feels no anger toward Carroll or his accuser. His mother echoed those thoughts Monday, saying she could understand how the woman may have been confused. "It's possible to confuse (Taylor and Carroll), if you were awoken in the night like that," she said. "I don't hold any hostility toward her. Now is the time to thank God and move on."
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5198221.html
Now is the time to thank God. Wow.
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