Lost evidence hampers reopening old cases

By Ed Stoddard

DALLAS (Reuters) - James Waller spent 10 years behind bars and waited another 14 years -- when his movements were restricted as a sex offender -- before DNA evidence finally cleared his name.

He is one of the lucky ones, according to the Innocence Project, a New York-based organization dedicated to exonerating wrongly convicted people.

DNA testing allows crime laboratories to compare genetic evidence at a crime scene, such as semen, with the DNA of a suspect.

Some 218 people have been exonerated in the United States using DNA since the technique was first used to overturn convictions in 1989.

But for many others, the evidence has either been lost or simply was not preserved, the Innocence Project says.

Only 25 of America's 50 states and Washington have legislation compelling authorities to preserve evidence of old cases. Even where such laws exist, they are often inadequate, while storage procedures and facilities are poor.

"In New York City we have around 20 cases we are working on where the evidence simply cannot be located. It's unavailable to us for testing and we don't know if it is lost or if it has been destroyed," said Rebecca Brown, a policy analyst at the Innocence Project.

Waller, 52, was convicted in 1983 of sexually assaulting an adolescent boy. He spent 10 years in prison and for 14 years he was registered as a sex offender, preventing him from visiting his nieces or going where children might be present, such as parks or basketball games.

"A dog could go where I couldn't go," Waller said in an interview in an east Dallas coffee shop.

The jurisdiction where Waller was convicted, Dallas County, Texas, leads the country in such cases, with 17 people cleared by DNA evidence. An 18th person was scheduled for release on July 3.

An aggressive district attorney goes a long way to explaining the number of wrongful convictions, according to Fred Moss of the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

"A lot of these cases occurred under the Wade administration and the culture of that office was aggressive, advancement was based on conviction rates," Moss said.

He was referring to the late Henry Wade, the Dallas District Attorney for more than 35 years, who oversaw famous cases such as the prosecution of Jack Ruby for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

The policy of the District Attorney's office during the 1980s, when many of these trials occurred, was to "nail scalps to the wall," Moss said.

Another factor is racism in a big town in the U.S. South. Of the 17 people whose convictions were overturned on DNA evidence in Dallas County, 13 of them are black. Nationally, two thirds of the 218 exonerated were black.