Michael Green is now a free man after 27 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The Houston Chronicle article has links to some great video footage. AGB
The Dallas Morning News reports yet another DNA exoneration out of Harris County (Houston). According to the story, “Michael Anthony Green, 44, is expected to be released on bond Thursday, the district attorney’s office said in a statement. It remains only for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to clear Green’s conviction.”
Green has been in prison for 27 years for a crime he did not commit.
The culprits appear to be tunnel vision (investigators identify a suspect without examining alternative theories of the crime) and “confirmation bias” (potential witnesses are pressured to confirm the state’s theory).
According to Green’s attorney, Robert Wicoff, “It happened because the police didn’t take all the steps they needed to take to make sure they had the right man. They also used suggestive interrogation techniques when they questioned the victim that prompted her to identify my client.”
The good news is that Harris County has created a post-conviction review mechanism similar to the Conviction Integrity DA Craig Watkins created in Dallas County.
Here’s the heart of the DMN article:
According to the district attorney’s office, four men abducted the woman from the Greenspoint district on April 18, 1983. They forced her into their vehicle and drove to a remote area, where three of the men sexually assaulted her.
Houston police pursued a stolen car resembling the description of the vehicle used in the abduction, and the car’s four occupants stopped and fled on foot in different directions. Police came upon Green, who was walking in the area. The victim could not identify Green in person when he was first detained, but later picked him from a photo lineup as one of her three attackers.
Green maintained his innocence. When Harris County District Attorney Patricia Lykos formed the new Post-Conviction Review Section, his case was among the first taken up.
“The evidence in this case had been sitting in the district clerk’s office for 27 years, and no one had taken the initiative to do anything with it in the past,” First Assistant District Attorney Jim Leitner said in the statement.
Scott Henson covers the Green story at Grits for Breakfast.
Friends of Justice 
Concerns about wrongful convictions have been around a long time. I don’t know how long, but at least going back into the ’60s.
I’ve watched quite a few “Bonanza” reruns lately. In one I saw a couple of days ago, Adam Cartwright is persuaded by an executed man’s son to look into his case. Adam conducts a hearing in Virginia City’s saloon, and proves that the man hanged a year earlier was in fact innocent, and that the chief witness for the state and the judge were in the pocket of railroad interests who wanted the man’s land. I don’t know whether post-execution exonerations ever occurred in the old western, but I have little doubt that wrongful executions occurred then, and still occur today.
Interesting to see the theme on a popular western TV show of a generation ago.
It happens all the time. The same thing with Curtis Flowers. I just hope it doesn’t take 27 years for people to get some real investigators to Winona to turn these people out. Everybody around here has been paid to lie already.