Yesterday, KPRC-950 talker Chris Baker called our attention to the latest installment of Houston’s Crime Lab Follies, a wrongful conviction lawsuit seeking millions from the City of Houston (as reported by the Chronicle‘s Mary Flood):
George Rodriguez’s lawyer asked a federal jury Monday to make the city pay “tens of millions of dollars” for the disgraced Houston Police Department’s crime lab’s pivotal role in the wrongful conviction that put his client behind bars for 17 years.
“What was taken away from him was his youth,” said attorney Barry Scheck, whose Innocence Project works on behalf of convicts in similar circumstances. Rodriguez went to prison wrongly at age 26 and walked out at 43 to find his three daughters grown and his father dead, the lawyer said.
In opening statements Tuesday afternoon, Scheck told jurors about the loneliness, fear and depression his client suffered in prison after being wrongly convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl.
This happened, he said, because policy makers at the city of Houston were deliberately indifferent to rampant under funding, under staffing and a lack of supervision at the crime lab that created a high risk an innocent person could be convicted or the guilty one could go free.
Former mayor and HPD chief Lee Brown today was forced to say more than we have ever heard from him on the topic of his mismanagement of the crime lab. Here are some choice excerpts from Mary Flood’s reporting for the Chronicle:
Lee P. Brown testified Wednesday that crime lab mistakes made during his tenure as Houston police chief weren’t his fault and that he worked hard to get the lab the resources it needed.
[snip]
“There was a consistent desire of people in the lab to get more people and consistently I tried to get more people for them,” Brown said. But, he said, in the mid-1980s the city had a hiring freeze, the police academy was closed and he couldn’t get all the required positions or even overtime approved.
[snip]
Showing Brown several police department memos about the crime lab, Rodriguez’s attorney questioned Brown about being told the lab was understaffed and that people lacked training and supervision. A 1986 memo said the lab was “cutting additional corners” and had “diluted quality assurance” and that it could be “embarrassed” because of lab deficiencies.
Brown testified he considered staffing problems to be the root cause of all those references to unreliable lab results and failure to meet professional standards.
“It was tough for the city,” Brown said. “I fought hard to get them what they needed.”
“It turned out it was tough for some criminal defendants who were not guilty, too,” shot back Rodriguez’s attorney Mark Wawro.
Cory Crow elaborates on Lee Brown’s hard fighting.
We’ve noted the Lee Brown/Clarence Bradford reign of error previously with regard to the crime lab, and the fact that neither man has ever given much of a public accounting of his role in the fiasco (Bradford despite running for Harris County DA, and now for City Council). Whatever the outcome of this case, at least Lee Brown has finally been forced to discuss his part in perpetuating the crime-lab fiasco. His testimony doesn’t seem to have convinced many Chron.com commenters.
