You may have heard by now about the proven-innocent man in Dallas finally freed after serving 30 years in prison for a rape and robbery he didn't commit? It was covered by NPR and the Associated Press.
Horrible as it is/was, it's certainly not the first time an innocent man was imprisoned, certainly. It's been the stuff of books and movies seemingly forever, certainly.
Cornelius Dupree is an African-American who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and then wrongly, mistakenly "found guilty" and imprisoned, as I said, for a rape and robbery he didn't commit. It's also not uncommon for the way he was "found guilty", either, since it was based on a really bad "positive lineup".
What makes the story additionally important and noteable, however, is that it took an African-American District Attorney in Dallas, one Craig Watkins, to push, time and again, to go back over old cases with existing, stored evidence to see if those proven guilty were, in fact, truly guilty. As soon as he was elected to his position in 2006, he got busy:
Sworn in as Dallas County district attorney on Jan. 1 -- he is the first elected black district attorney in Texas -- Watkins fired or accepted the resignations of almost two dozen high-level white prosecutors and began hiring minorities and women.
And in an unprecedented act for any jurisdiction in the nation, he announced he would allow the Texas affiliate of the Innocence Project to review hundreds of Dallas County cases dating back to 1970 to decide whether DNA tests should be conducted to validate past convictions.
What's terrific is that Mr. Watkins' stated goal is, as "the criminal code of the state of Texas and the American Bar Association’s code clearly state that the job of a prosecutor is to seek justice," no more and no less and so he is.
Good for him and good for the people of Texas.
All of them.
Justice is being served.
Links: http://www.npr.org/templates/search/index.php?searchinput=man+found+innocent+in+Texas&sort=match&tabId=text
http://www.bowtieprofessor.com/african-american-studies/dallas-district-attorney-craig-watkins-a-hero-of-our-time-2010-03-878
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/04/AR2007030401566.html
http://reason.com/archives/2008/04/07/is-this-americas-best-prosecut
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3 comments:
Why can a European American be called white but an African American can't be called black?
What a mouth full of political correctness! It sounds utterly stupid, especially twice in the same sentence.
I disagree completely and for a couple reasons.
First, I think the time has clearly come that "African-American" and "black" and "white" are all used freely and without any negative connotations on any of the 3. I don't avoid "black" and wasn't trying to here. It just happened that way.
Second, I'm not even really sure which sentence you're talking about and feel so strongly about what I said above, I don't even care which it was. It was just an oversight, not trying to be "politically correct" at all, honestly.
I used the term African-American in the title intentionally for effect, RDM, for emphasis.
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