Dallas DA Hires Defense Lawyer to Help Free Wrongly Convicted
The district attorney of Dallas County, the first African-American to be elected prosecutor in Texas, is focusing on freeing the wrongly convicted.
D.A. Craig Watkins is only a year into the job, but he is already changing the culture of an office that had a national reputation for playing hardball, the Chicago Tribune reports. In the office next to him is the man he installed as head of his office’s conviction integrity unit, Michael Ware, whose job is to review about 400 convictions, order DNA tests where appropriate and free the innocent.
Ware, a former defense lawyer, had overseen the Innocence Project at Texas Wesleyan law school.
Watkins also was a former defense lawyer, with an office in a poor neighborhood of the city. He has given capital punishment only “a tepid endorsement,” the article says, and is supporting diversion programs to keep people out of jail. But the focus on exonerating the wrongly convicted through DNA is perhaps the most dramatic difference between Watkins, a Democrat, and his Republican predecessors.
Dallas County has had 15 DNA exonerations, the most of any county in the country. Five have occurred since Watkins took office. Watkins goes to court to personally apologize to those who were wrongfully convicted.
“If you’re in a position of dispensing justice and you fail, you have to do something,” he told the Tribune. “The least you can do is to apologize. You can’t give them the years back.”
