Wedding bells are in the future for Debbie Denmon, Director of Communications for the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office.  During a recent taping of The Texas Daily, a local news program that Denmon frequents, Richard Gregor entered stage right and bowed on one knee.

Gregor had contacted the staff of The Texas Daily to make arrangements to propose in an arena that is all too familiar to Denmon – on air. Clearly surprised by the ‘guest appearance,’ with hands shaking and tears surfacing, she replied, “Of course it’s yes.”

The couple has yet to set an official date for their nuptials, but they are considering sometime later this fall.

Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Gary McDonald was recently awarded with the ‘Prosecutor Service Award’ at a MADD’s “Take the Wheel” Law Enforcement Awards Recognition ceremony in Dallas.

ADA McDonald currently serves in the Intake Division of the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office. He was honored for his tireless efforts in the prosecution of the numerous DWI and alcohol-related cases that are presented to the DA’s office.

Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins was recently honored as the recipient of the 2013  ‘Justice Policy Innovator’ award from the Law & Public Policy section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS).  Each year, the ACJS honors an innovator in criminal justice at their annual academic conference.

This year marked the 50^th anniversary of the ACJS, entitled “The Politics of Crime and Criminal Justice,” and was hosted in Dallas with participants from across the nation.  ACJS is comprised of criminal justice academics, and also law enforcement officers and practitioners.

District Attorney Watkins received the prestigious award for his creation of the Conviction Integrity Unit that reviews and re-investigates legitimate post conviction claims of innocence.  Dr. Craig Hemmens, President of ACJS, said, “Wrongful convictions, and the pursuit of justice for all, is a key issue for all concerned with the criminal justice system, including those of us, in ACJS who study it and teach students about it.”  Dr. Hemmens also serves as the Department Head of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Missouri State University.

Dr. Randall Grometstein, Chair of the Behavioral Science Department at Fitchburg State University nominated DA Watkins for the prestigious award. “Designees may be citizens acting in civil society, employees or administrators of criminal justice agencies, members of the judiciary or the legal profession, or scholars,” said Grometstein. “District Attorney Watkins’ national leadership has led in recent years to prosecutors being involved in a higher proportion of exonerations than in the past.”

District Attorney Watkins was honored to receive the award and is hopeful that the recognition casts a broader understanding to the importance of the Conviction Integrity Unit. “This award exemplifies that law enforcement offices throughout the nation are interested in a new way of doing business,” said Watkins. “We must have integrity when prosecuting cases. It simply comes down to being smart on crime.”

(Dallas, TX – April 17, 2013) – The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office is proud to present its first graduation ceremony for more than a dozen students who just completed the Junior Prosecutor Academy. It’s a six week program offered at Thomas Edison Middle School in West Dallas, and the classes are offered during the tutoring hour.

The academy provides a dynamic environment for students to learn what prosecutors do in the courtroom and how it relates to law enforcement. Dallas County prosecutors teach students how to use crime scene investigation techniques, conduct field sobriety tests with intoxication simulation goggles, and how to admit evidence in a trial.  Some of the classes include material from actual cases, so real crime scene photos are utilized.

“We hope to expose these students to how the justice system works. The Junior Prosecution Academy’s final class took place at the Frank Crowley Courts Building, so they could tour the courtrooms and see some trials in process. We hope to inspire these youth who are from high crime areas to become prosecutors, but more importantly to not end up on the wrong side of the law,” said District Attorney Craig Watkins.

The academy was born out of the Dallas DA’s newly created Community Prosecution Unit, which aims to be the active ambassador of our office’s community initiatives and educational programs. Assistant District Attorney Rachael Jones oversees the unit which is comprised of four additional prosecutors and one investigator. They develop action plans for neighborhood crime watch groups, educate DISD students about cyber bullying, the criminal consequences of girls dating older men, and any other problem plaguing a particular campus.

The Junior Prosecutor Academy is the unit’s crown jewel. “I am excited that Mr. Watkins appointed me to head up the unit and to develop the academy. There’s nothing quite as rewarding as seeing the spark in a child’s eyes – hoping that their future is shaped forever by seeing the positive effects of law enforcement,” said Assistant DA Rachael Jones. The spotlight will shine brightly on these students at the graduation ceremony tomorrow at noon, April 18, 2013 inside the foyer of the 11^th floor of the Frank Crowley Courts Building, 133 N. Riverfront Blvd., Dallas, Texas.

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Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Russell Wilson. Photo credit: Telisha Brown.

DA’s Watkins, Wilson discuss freeing wrongfully convicted 

by Telisha Brown | The Shorthorn

posted April 11th, 2013

Asst. District Attorney Russell Wilson, of Dallas County, and District Attorney Craig Watkins spoke during a lecture at UTA in Pickard Hall on Thursday about Watkins’ theoretical approach to handling crimes, and also the issue of freeing wrongfully convicted inmates.

Wilson said the traditional “tough-on-crime” approach has been destroying families and communities, and the District Attorney’s office has developed different types of initiatives to address the issues. Its “smart-on-crime” approach is to use the information that it has to prosecute a case, Wilson said.

In the case of non-violent criminals, they are still punished for their conduct, but the office does not “throw the book” at them.Wilson said that non-violent offenders would be more successful in society, as opposed to sending them to prison, because society is impacted in so many ways.

“If you study sociology, when you take a young person and send them to prison, there is an impact on their family,” Wilson said. “There is an impact on the victim; later, there is an impact on society as far as employment and getting a job.”

The Conviction Integrity Unit and the Dallas District Attorney’s office exonerated 33 people because of science and DNA testing. The criminal justice system has evolved and science has provided a way to bring justice to those who are innocent, Watkins said.

Two days into his office, in 2007, an individual who had claimed innocence for five years was exonerated. After the individual was released, he went downstairs to shake the person’s hand to say, “I am sorry,” Watkins said.

Later, he decided to bring his administration together to look at other innocent convict claims, because a bill had passed 2004 called the Justice for All Act for post-DNA testing, Watkins said.

President George Bush signed the Justice for All Act into law on October 30, 2004.

“We created a laboratory to look at the failure of our system,” Watkins said. “The lab told us that we needed to do things differently than we have in the past and DNA was the answer for it.”

Watkins said science gave us the opportunity to go back and look at other issues that related to convictions.

“In every case we’ve exonerated, the identifications were wrong,” Watkins said.

Watkins said the District Attorney’s office encountered controversy because its office is typically meant to convict, but the District Attorney’s office is really suppose to seek justice and the truth.

“Wherever it leads us, that is where we will go,” Watkins said.

Benjamin Owens, history pre-law sophomore, said taking time to scrutinize the conviction and criminal justice process is important, and students should be more educated about this process.

“We need more presentations like this to educate the community, especially students,” Owens said. “Because they will be the ones making the decisions and ‘calling the shots’ in the future.”

Criminal Justice junior Derek Bunting said there are flaws in the criminal justice system, but he also believes there is good in the system, and if the Dallas District Attorneys believe in the system, then he will believe in the system, too.

“I believe the system is a work in progress, but sooner or later it will be right for everyone,” Bunting said.

Watkins is the head District Attorney of Dallas County, and the first Black District Attorney in the history of Texas.

Wilson supervises the first-ever Conviction Integrity Unit, and he is the third ranking official at the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office.

Dallas County District Attorney is the ninth largest office in the country and processes nearly 100,000 cases per year.

The Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, the Center for African American Studies, the African American Faculty Staff Association and the Alpha Phi Sigma criminal justice honor society co-sponsored the lecture.

Exoneree detectives fight for those still behind bars

by Michael May | NPR

posted on April 16, 2023

Christopher Scott, Johnnie Lindsey and Billy Smith drive down a desolate highway toward a prison in East Texas. They’ve all been there before, serving hard time — 63 years among the three of them.

But this time it’s different. They’re driving a Hummer. They’re dressed to the nines. And they’re on a mission. They aim to get an inmate out — a friend of Scott’s named Jimmy O’Steen, aka Big O. But this will be a slow-motion prison break. Scott, Lindsey and Smith are all exonerated prisoners.

Dallas is home to more than 40 exonerees — people who have been released from prison because they were proved innocent. These Dallas exonerees have formed a club of sorts to help others as they’re released.

But the group has gone beyond group therapy. They’ve formed their own detective agency, looking to crack the hardest innocence cases: The ones where there’s no DNA to test; ones that often rely solely on eyewitness identification.

Scott believes O’Steen is one of those innocents, and he aims to prove it. Inside the prison, the men sit across from O’Steen in a small barren room to discuss his case. O’Steen was convicted of armed robbery in 1997 and sentenced to 75 years in prison.

“The suspect was supposed to be 140 pounds, 6 feet tall. I was 240-plus. The suspect had a clean-shaven face … I had a moustache. There was two cars that fit the description. But my license plate number supposed to have been the closest one to the person,” O’Steen explains.

“We both been in that same chair you’re sitting in, with the same situation, so … we’re on your side until the end,” Lindsey says. “But I got one question to ask: Are you guilty?”

“No,” O’Steen answers.

Trying To Crack The Hardest Cases

The men know just how tough it will be to get O’Steen out without DNA evidence to test. It’s going to take a real shoe-leather investigation.

“If we able to crack this, and get it to where this man get exonerated, it will put us on a whole new level — whole new playing field,” Scott says.

Scott, 42, is handsome, with short hair, a goatee and a movie star smile. His teeth were rotted out from years in prison, but nothing $30,000 of reconstructive dental surgery couldn’t fix.

He may seem like an odd choice to put together a team of private investigators, but in the almost 13 years he spent working to get himself out of prison, he learned a lot about the law — and about perseverance.

“The struggle I went through to get out [of prison], I said, well, I gotta do something to try to make it better for the other individual[s] who are in prison right now,” he says.

Scott’s case, like most of the other exonerees, was based on mistaken eyewitness identification. It was 1997, and two men had robbed and shot a man in his own home. The cops thought Scott and his friend Claude Simmons fit the description given by the victim’s wife. They were convicted on her testimony.

With no DNA evidence to turn to, a prison lawyer gave Scott a million-in-one chance of getting out. But Scott says he’s a fighter, not a quitter. He kept sending letters to anyone who might be able to help.

Meanwhile, Dallas justice was being transformed. For most of the 20th century, Dallas prosecutors were proudly “tough on crime.” That philosophy was personified by former District Attorney Henry Wade, who held the post for a record 36 years.

Wade’s prosecutors won more than 90 percent of their cases. But that number doesn’t seem as impressive now as it once did.

“I guess I can sum it up in one colloquial they used in that time,” says current D.A. Craig Watkins. “A good prosecutor can get a guilty verdict on a person that’s guilty. But a great prosecutor is one that can get a guilty verdict on an innocent individual.”

Watkins, first elected in 2006, is not in the Wade mold. He’s also the city’s first black D.A., and was willing to take a new look at some questionable past convictions.

“We reinvestigated the cases [to conduct] a legitimate investigation. Which in most of those cases was not had,” he says.

In 2009, students from a nearby law clinic convinced Watkins to reopen Scott and Simmons’ case. One of the men who actually committed the murder confessed in detail. Watkins had never recommended releasing a prisoner without DNA proof, but in October 2009, Scott and Simmons found themselves in a courtroom, standing in front of Judge Robert Burns.

“The evidence supports a final finding of fact showing that each defendant in these two cases is actually innocent,” the judge read to a breakout of applause.

Texas gives exonerees $160,000 for every year served. Today, Scott lives alone in a sprawling five-bedroom house. After years of living in a cell, he says he enjoys the space.

Before his arrest, he was living with his girlfriend and his two sons, but the relationship didn’t last. He’s now trying to figure out how to be a father again to his kids, who are 23 and 24.

On a recent Saturday, Scott was at home preparing for a meeting of his nonprofit, House of Renewed Hope, an association of former exonerees. The men meet regularly to help each other deal with the struggles of re-entering the free world and are now working on a booklet for other exonerees.

The group members arrive one by one, in button-down shirts, leather shoes and fedoras. Steven Phillips is among them. He was exonerated before Scott, and gave Scott money and a place to stay after his release. Phillips reads from a letter he’s received from a prisoner’s family member.

“I was wondering if your organization would be willing to help me get my brother-in-law out of jail,” he reads. “He was wrongly accused with no evidence, and will now be sent to prison in a couple of weeks for something that he didn’t do. Please help.”

The group has a pile of letters just like that. And while they can’t help with every case, they decide they’ll follow up on this one.

‘All Of Us Fit The Same Type Of Description’

The men have also worked hard to lobby for criminal justice reform in the state. They’re frequent visitors to the Texas Capitol in Austin. Last session, they helped pass new rules for eyewitness identification. In March, Christopher Scott and other exonerees were honored on the floor of the state House.

But goodwill is not enough to change laws. That’s why Scott and his group are working on getting O’Steen exonerated, meeting with witnesses and the district attorney.

O’Steen’s case is difficult. There are only a few ways to overturn a non-DNA conviction: Get the actual perpetrator to confess, for example; or have a witness recant testimony. So far, there’s been no break in O’Steen’s case, but Scott’s not giving up.

The guys from the House of Renewed Hope recently met with Dallas D.A. Watkins. They brought O’Steen’s trial transcript along.

“In my whole 13 years, me and this guy did 12 years on the same wing together,” Scott tells the D.A. The description used to arrest O’Steen, Scott says, was vague.

“At that time, all of us being convicted of a crime, all of us fit the same type of description, man,” Scott says. “A mid-aged guy, medium height, medium weight with a low haircut. “How many people you describing when you describe that?”

“So automatically, y’all have credibility with this office because you’ve experienced it,” Watkins tells the group. “That in itself is enough for us to take a look at this.”

It’s a measure of how far these men have come. Instead of stewing in cramped prison cells, they’re out, key players working to change things. Still, Scott knows all too well how long it could take to get O’Steen out, even with the district attorney onboard. So he’s got his team opening other cases, as well.

Exoneree Michael Morton
photo credit: Dallas Morning News

A twist for the lock-’em-up state: More Texas law enforcers are refusing to throw away the key – for the innocent 

by Miles Moffeit | Dallas Morning News

posted April 9, 2013

After a messy history of blocking efforts to free the wrongly convicted, Texas law enforcers now lead the nation in clearing them, according to a new report by The National Registry of Exonerations.

Police or prosecutors in the Lone Star state,the registry says, have been either responsible or played a major role in exonerating 53 of 114 convicts since 1989.

That puts Texas first among states with the most exonerations, according to the registry managed by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The registry, updated at least once a year, contains details of exonerations finalized through the end of 2012.

One of the big factors behind Texas’ status: about half of the 53 exonerees were handled by the Dallas County District Attorney office, which founded the nation’s first conviction integrity unit five years ago to examine pitfalls in convictions.

Nationally, Texas is helping lead a critical shift inside the justice system. In 2012, for the first time, police and prosecutors initiated or cooperated in a majority of U.S. exonerations documented by the registry – 34 of 63 cases. In Texas, the authorities backed all 10 exonerations announced last year.

Over the previous 24 years nationwide, only 30 percent of such cases were supported by law enforcement.

“This is extremely important,” Samuel Gross, law professor and editor of the registry, told me. “It means that prosecutors and police officers increasingly realize that mistakes can be made. It’s an important part of their work to correct them. And law enforcement officers have more information and more power to deal with these issues.”

Many factors are behind the trend. The power of DNA analysis as a truth teller is more widely known and accepted. Laws in states such as Texas are increasingly facilitating testing. There’s also a greater awareness among police that the rush to convict can lead to wrongful convictions.

Dallas has been the pace setter for remedying miscarriages. Since 2007, when DA Craig Watkins set up an integrity unit, other large jurisdictions have followed suit. In 2009, Houston created one, followed by New York County in 2010, then Chicago, San Jose and others, according to the registry.

District Attorney Craig Watkins discusses the importance of the Racial Justice Act to law students at Wake Forest School of Law. Photo Credit: Dave Rolfe | Winston-Salem Journal

First black district attorney speaks to Wake Forest law students; has pushed for Racial Justice Act in Texas

by Michael Hewlett | Winston-Salem Journal

posted: April 4, 2013 at 9:33 pm

As the first black District Attorney in Texas, Craig Watkins doesn’t shy away from race; he confronts it.

And he said that’s because of his experience growing up black in Dallas.

“Traditionally, people of color have had a negative view of law-enforcement, and it’s warranted,” he said in an appearance Thursday at Wake Forest University School of Law that was sponsored by the Black Law Students Association and the Innocence and Justice Clinic. Mark Rabil, the director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic, moderated the conversation with Watkins, who has been district attorney in Dallas County, Texas, since 2006.

He said he remembers when police officers would come to his neighborhood to investigate a dead body. The officers seemed more concerned with checking on possible outstanding warrants on people in the neighborhood than in figuring out who committed the crime, Watkins said.

That experience has led Watkins to be a different kind of prosecutor, one he describes as being smart on crime rather than tough on crime. Watkins has a conviction integrity unit in his office that investigates claims of wrongful convictions and has resulted in 33 exonerations.

Watkins currently is pushing for a Racial Justice Act in Texas, similar to the North Carolina law that the N.C. Senate repealed Wednesday. The law, adopted in 2009, allowed death-row inmates and defendants facing the death penalty to use statewide statistics to prove that racial bias played a significant role in their case. If successful, a judge would commute a death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The proposed legislation still has to go through the N.C. House.

Legislation has been proposed in Texas, but Watkins said he doesn’t think it will be successful this time. But he said he strongly supports it and is glad that the issue of race in the criminal system is on people’s radar.

“Anyone who believes that race doesn’t play a role in the criminal justice system is naïve,” Watkins said.

Watkins is also opposed to the death penalty in Texas. Because of his opposition, Watkins said, he decided to form a death penalty review panel, made up of the most experienced prosecutors in his office. That panel reviews each murder case that could be eligible for the death penalty, he said.

He said he doesn’t want to leave the decision to pursue the death penalty up to politics. Watkins said his office has prosecuted eight capital murder cases and out of those, defendants in seven of those cases received the death penalty.

Watkins told law students and others gathered at the law school that he doesn’t believe in being tough on crime. He said he wants to be smart on crime. For him, that means using the bully pulpit of his office to advocate for more resources for education because the majority of the people his office sends to prison don’t have a high school diploma.

It also means that his office works with private organizations to help inmates released from prison stay out of prison, he said.

Watkins said he received some resistance from law enforcement when he first took office, particularly when he started the conviction integrity unit in his office. But over the past few years, law enforcement has changed some of its policies on preserving evidence, videotaping interrogations and other things.

Having 33 exonerations certainly helped change minds, he said.

Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill told Watkins that his office has similar policies in reviewing death penalty cases. He also said that law-enforcement officers are required to contact a prosecutor when they arrest someone for a felony charge.

O’Neill, however, has strongly opposed the Racial Justice Act in North Carolina, calling it a subversive attempt to end the death penalty in the state. He said he supports the recent efforts in the N.C. General Assembly to repeal the Racial Justice Act.

Jason Hornsby, a third-year law student from Dallas, said he has followed Watkins’ career and worked to get Watkins to Wake Forest. He applauded the fact that Watkins has a conviction integrity unit in his office. He said having the district attorney investigate allegations of wrongful convictions helps both prosecutors and law enforcement do a better job.

“That’s the most effective route to make sure the system is working,” Hornsby said.

Exoneree Richard Miles and Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins. (AP)

Registry Finds More Exonerations in 2012

By Maggie Clark – Staff Writer | Stateline (The PEW Charitable Trusts)

Originally posted April 3, 2013

Since 1989, at least 1,089 people convicted of crimes have been officially cleared based on new evidence of their innocence, according to the National Registry of Exonerations annual report released Wednesday (April 3).

That total includes 178 exonerations that researchers at the University of Michigan Law School and Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law uncovered in the past year. Sixty-nine of those people were exonerated in 2012, the rest were cleared in earlier years but hadn’t been included in the database until now.

The researchers, led by Professor Samuel Gross and veteran journalist Maurice Possley, launched a national registry of exonerations last year. The people included in the report, who come from 45 states and the District of Columbia, were convicted of crimes ranging from murder to tax fraud.

Since 1989, California leads the states with 125 total exonerations, followed by Texas, Illinois and New York. All four states have laws that allow post-conviction evidence testing and encourage police and prosecutors to re-examine cases where a conviction might be in doubt.

Researchers discovered these cases by combing through public records, “scattered in courthouses around the country over three decades,” said Gross in a Twitter Q&A session about the findings of the report.

One notable difference between the 69 exonerations in 2012 and those in previous years was the number aided by prosecutors or police. In just over half of the 2012 exonerations, police or prosecutors assisted in confirming that the previously charged offender was wrongfully convicted. Between 1989 and 2011, police and prosecutors assisted in about 30 percent of the exonerations.

Gross and Possley attribute the increase to new state laws which facilitate post-conviction evidence testing and the creation of conviction integrity units in the district attorneys’ offices in Dallas, Houston, Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Jose, Calif., Chicago and Lake County, Ill., which specialize in reviewing old cases. It also might reflect a growing understanding of wrongful convictions, their causes and the cost of getting convictions wrong, Gross and Possley said.

“If prosecutors and police are more open clearing the names of innocent people, it sends a positive message,” said Gross. “After all, the purpose of law enforcement is to seek truth and pursue justice.”

The researchers said their discovery this past year of exonerations that occurred before 2012 supports their suspicion that “the exonerations we now know about are only a fraction of all exonerations that have occurred.”

The cause of a wrongful conviction tends to vary by offense type, according to data analysis from the report. In homicide cases, wrongful convictions tend to result from deliberate misidentification, the researchers found. When the charge was sexual assault and robbery, the leading cause of wrongful convictions was mistaken witness identification.

The vehicle for exoneration also varies. While exonerations using DNA analysis grab headlines, they only made up about one third of all exonerations from 1989 to 2012. Most of the defendants in the database were exonerated because of the belated disclosure of perjury or mistaken witness identification, not DNA analysis.

Dallas County DA: Profession feels like it’s under attack
FOX News (original airing April 3, 2013)