Another Black Man Exonerated in Texas.

I love the Dallas County DA - they're clearing these cases at an unbelievable rate...

Hard to believe so many innocent black men were imprisoned in Texas to begin with. They'd die in prison without DNA to exonerate them. A bunch of people already are.

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Dallas County man cleared in 1979 rape, robbery will be Texas' longest-serving exoneree

12:00 AM CST on Tuesday, January 4, 2011

By JENNIFER EMILY / The Dallas Morning News
jemily@dallasnews.com

Two men convicted in connection with a 1979 Dallas rape, robbery and abduction have been cleared of the crime through DNA testing. They have served about three decades in prison – more than any other Texas inmate cleared by DNA testing.

The exonerations are also the first where DNA testing has been used in Dallas County to prove men innocent of crimes that occurred as far back as the 1970s. Until recently, authorities thought that evidence had only been preserved by the county's crime lab since 1981, said Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project in New York. The discovery that other testable evidence exists could mean Dallas County's national record number of 20 exonerations since 2001 will keep growing.

"It may provide grounds to go back and look at other evidence from older cases where we thought there was nothing to test," Morrison said. "It's really a miracle it was saved."

Cornelius Dupree Jr., 51, is expected to be exonerated today in a Dallas County courtroom. He is on parole after having been released in July. He spent more than 30 years in prison.

His exoneration, the 21st, will be the first in Dallas County since May 2009, although three other men have been cleared since then with other evidence.

The second man, Anthony Ray Massingill, 49, will remain behind bars for now while authorities search for evidence to test in a second rape for which he is serving a life sentence.

Neither Dupree nor Massingill could be reached for comment. They were wrongly convicted in a Nov. 23, 1979, attack on a 26-year-old woman who was confronted at gunpoint along with a male friend after they stopped for cigarettes and to use a pay phone at a liquor store on Dolphin Road, north of Interstate 30.

The attackers carjacked the victims and eventually ordered the man from the car. They then raped the woman while holding a gun on her. They debated whether to kill her before shoving her out of the vehicle and threatening to kill her if she called the police. She was found unconscious in a median by a police officer.

Five or six days later, two men tried to sell the woman's rabbit fur coat at a grocery store two miles from the liquor store. The stolen car was found in the parking lot. Dupree and Massingill are not believed to be these men.

Dupree and Massingill were arrested Dec. 1, 1979, two miles from where the abduction occurred. Police initially stopped them because they matched the description of men wanted in connection with a similar case. Massingill had a gun; Dupree was unarmed.

Wrongly identified

Paul Cates, also of the Innocence Project, said the rape victim wrongly identified Dupree and Massingill in a photo lineup. The male victim could not pick out Dupree or Massingill.

At trial, both victims identified Dupree as one of the men who abducted them. Cates said that the woman, at times, confused the identities of the two defendants when identifying them in court.

Massingill was sentenced to three 10-year terms and a life sentence in connection with the liquor store abduction and another 1979 rape-robbery.

Dupree was sentenced to 75 years in prison for the liquor store robbery. He was not tried on the liquor store abduction-rape because prosecutors thought it wouldn't result in any more prison time. Although he was a suspect, a grand jury declined to indict him in the second 1979 robbery-abduction.

Evidence preserved

The Innocence Project accepted the case in 2007 after an intense review. Morrison said Dupree had written to them a few years earlier.

The Innocence Project first contacted the Dallas County district attorney's office about the case in 2008. The district attorney's office then asked the crime lab to search for any evidence in the case.

The lab found and tested pubic hairs from the victim's rape exam that contained genetic material from two men who were not Dupree and Massingill. Had the hair not contained two other men's DNA, neither Dupree nor Massingill would have likely been cleared in the case, Morrison said.

Morrison said that even if the crime lab does not find DNA to test in Massingill's other case, it's possible he could still be freed. She said that authorities at the time believed the same men were responsible for both crimes.

Morrison said the real perpetrators have not been identified, but she was not sure whether the test results had been compared with a national DNA database.

The Dallas County district attorney's office said Monday that prosecutors would answer questions about the case today. Massingill's attorney, Michelle Moore of the Dallas County public defender's office, declined to comment.

Preliminary tests showing Dupree's innocence came back two weeks after he was paroled because of time he'd earned through good behavior. The results of the final test – DNA from the victim confirming that the lab correctly labeled the sample – were not available until December.

Morrison said Dupree could have been released on parole earlier if he had admitted his guilt. But like many exonerees, he refused to do so. 

Liberty and Justice for All: AZ Freedom March 2010.

Staggering into the morning from a two-week period of fevers, fatigue, and altered consciousness - punctuated by the grief of traumatized families - I found myself at the Freedom March for the Wrongfully Convicted on the State House lawn Saturday. It was organized by Camille Tilley, Courtney Bisbee's mom. As detailed by Stephen Lemons in the Phoenix New Times, Courtney was a school nurse and single mom when she was falsely accused of touching a teenaged boy and sentenced to 11 years in prison as a child molester. Sensationalized by the press, Courtney was convicted and condemned before she even went to trial.

Camille and Tom Tilley, 2008.

Now, six or seven years later, Courtney's still fighting for her child and her freedom from behind bars. The evidence exonerating her has been in the hands of the Maricopa County Attorney's office for over 4 years now. Andrew Thomas just sat on it. We're waiting to see if Rick Romley picks her file up before he goes. He had the courage to drop capital murder charges against Lisa Randall, the babysitter the county worked two years on prosecuting for the death of a child who was in her care, so we're hopeful.

Camille is an extraordinary woman. She sees the bigger picture - the contexts in which her family has been repeatedly victimized by agents of the state - and goes after every piece of it she can get her teeth into: not just abuses of prosecutorial discretion, but also minimum mandatory sentencing, police brutality, conditions of confinement and medical neglect in the prisons, racial profiling, and early release provisions for non-violent offenders. The devastating events of recent weeks, the rapid rise in the prisoner death toll, and the timing of the Freedom March this year brought a new constituency under her wing: the families of people prosecuted for the symptoms of their mental illnesses.

I've spent much of my adult life studying crime, punishment, and serious mental illness in an effort to keep my own loved one out of prison. I successfully convinced a handful of judges and prosecutors across the country to drop charges against him drawing on my research into the trans-institutionalization of the mentally ill, particularly those dually diagnosed with psychiatric and substance abuse disorders. I kept a few of my homeless clients out of jail that way, too. My experience has been that most people working in the criminal justice system agree that most of the seriously mentally ill whose lives are being chewed up there don't belong in jail or prison, they need housing, community support services and access to psychiatric hospitals. Instead, unfortunately, the seriously mentally ill are three times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized.

Shannon Palmer is one of the most stark examples of the damage done to a person's life by wrongful prosecution and incarceration that I've ever seen, but "justice" destroys innocent lives every day. According to Camille's research (based, I believe, on exonerations in death penalty cases), up to 10% of people in prison may be wrongfully convicted; factually innocent. If you look at prosecutions such as Shannon's, sentences of imprisonment for women like Lasasha Cherry, and Tony Lester's prosecution and sentence, then the number of people we have in prison who really shouldn't be there increases dramatically.

As of August 2010, the Arizona Department of Corrections estimates than about 9,362 of their 40,204 prisoners - about 25% - need on-going mental health treatment. Many of those individuals were too incompetent to stand trial or even to plead guilty when first arraigned - how can we then hold them fully culpable for criminal intent and send them to prison? They also estimate that 75% of offenders enter the system with major substance abuse issues. It's a serious and common error to believe that the mentally ill and addicted are getting the treatment they need in a safe environment when incarcerated. They are the most vulnerable to trauma, abuse and exploitation, which most have endured enough of already.

Most of us fail to appreciate the huge chunk we take out of people's lives when we criminalize and incarcerate them, and what lasting repercussions there are. We take it for granted that our system is just. American justice is not designed to expedite the exoneration and liberation of the innocent or even to equalize the punishment of the guilty. Once you plead guilty or are convicted, it's damn near impossible to get out through the appeals system, and no matter how innocent you are, it's all too easy to be violated on probation or parole - Arizona couldn't keep the prisons full otherwise.


There are people still trying to clear their names who have long since done their time - time they never should have had to do. Many have lost their careers, homes and families in the process of being branded a criminal. And some, like Shannon Palmer and Tony Lester, have lost their lives to our way of dealing with crime and doling out punishment.

What really astonished me - everyone, perhaps - at Saturday's Freedom March was how well one of our state legislators, Cecil Ash, articulated all that and more. Representative Ash is the chair of the House Study Committee on Sentencing Reform and Co-Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. He not only spoke to the issues we've been dealing with, he sat and listened to every single story, in 100 degree heat, until 2:15 in the afternoon. He even took notes as families were talking about their experiences. And as far as I could tell, of all our state lawmakers, he was the only one to bother to come.

AZ Representative Cecil Ash,
Freedom March Phoenix, 2010.

You could tell by the way he talked about his letters from Arizona's prisoners that Representative Ash not only reads them, he's sincerely troubled by their predicaments and has been thinking about solutions. We incarcerate far too many non-violent offenders, and he wants to reduce time served before parole eligibility for some from 85% of their sentence to 65% of their sentence. He wants to rewrite some of the minimum mandatory sentencing guidelines to give judges more flexibility when they encounter defendants in exceptional circumstances.


Because of Brewer and Bill Macumber, Ash also wants a constitutional change to remove the power of clemency from the hands of the governor and invest it solely in a non-partisan board. And he wants to see prison reform so that people aren't needlessly suffering and dying while serving their time, regardless of their crime (or lack of one). Those are just a few of the changes he touched on wanting to raise the next legislative session.

Julie Acklin, Freedom March 2010, Phoenix.

While Representative Ash is our knight in shining armor, he wasn't the star of the show. The stars were the ordinary citizens who stood up to tell their stories and share their grief. Julie Acklin talked about her son Davon, sick in prison with Hep C and not getting treatment. She hopes his fight brings relief to all prisoners infected with HCV. We're planning to hit the lawn at CASS shelter this week to collect signature for the petition to the clemency board and educate people about Hep C.

Patti Jones brought nephew Tony Lester's daughter, just turning 1 that day, and told of his love for his family, the torment of his first psychotic break, his prosecution in the wake of a suicide attempt, and his death after being taken off his meds just a few weeks into a devastating 12-year prison term. Probably 20 of his relatives were there wearing t-shirts in his memory; they converted a table into a memorial with pictures and balloons. Patti pledged to organize with other families to push sentencing and prison reform to prevent what happened to Tony, trading numbers with Julie.

one of Tony Lester's little loved ones.

Other individuals and family members spoke eloquently and passionately about their disillusioning experiences with the criminal justice system in Arizona as well. There was considerable emphasis on mandatory minimum sentences and enhancements, abusive prosecution and the coercion involved in plea bargaining, and the non-incarceration consequences of being criminalized - including stigma, child custody issues, and the challenges that probation and parole stipulations present even to innocent people.

Allison Hicks ("Backspin") talked about her time in the Maricopa County Jail and her ordeal with wrongful prosecution, about which she has written and will soon have a movie. The Arizona Death Penalty Forum gave a brief presentation, and some of Jim Rix' books, Jingle Jangle, about AZ death row exoneree Ray Krone were on hand. Daniel Horne was with us in spirit - his books about Maricopa County corruption were distributed, and he sent an extensive handout for folks, which I hope to touch on in another post.

We also celebrated the success of our extensive efforts to get Andrew Thomas out of the Maricopa County Attorney's office and keep him from becoming AZ attorney general. He was huge obstruction of justice there. According to Camille, his office is responsible for over 200,000 convictions. If 10% of them are innocent, that's a long trail of beaten families and damaged lives he left in his wake, with no sign of remorse or concern. We will be expecting more out of Mr. Montgomery - who is reportedly sympathetic towards people with mental illness - assuming he takes office after Romley's term expires. Hopefully Arizonans will never again have to tolerate someone like Andrew Thomas in a position of such power again.

Thanks, Camille, for all you did to put together the day - and for all you do year round for prisoners and their families.

And thank you, Representative Ash. You give us hope that our government is not completely lost, and that our loved ones have not been permanently discarded.





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Prisoner Support SOS:Thalia Outlaw, Mississippi.

From  Sondra Dillard HumphreyApril 9, 2010 at 9:38pm at "FREE TALIA OUTLAW"


Thalia is incarcerated with the Scott Sisters.

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Subject: Thalia needs all of you

Please keep Thalia in your thoughts and prayers. She is really having a tough time and needs to know that she has people who believe in her and who are fighting for her. You will never know how much your words of encouragement mean to her whether it be through e-mail or snail mail. Thank you so much!

If you'd like to e-mail Thalia directly you can do so by going to the website:

https://www.accesscorrections.com/. 

You can either search by her name or her MDOC number, R7934. The minimum amount of credits you can purchase is $5 but the cost to send an e-mail is $.42 and it gets to her quickly. As always, I don't mind forwarding anything to her that you want to send through me.

You can also send her mail directly to her regular mail at:

Thalia Outlaw, R7034

C Bldg, Bed 103

P O Box 88550

Pearl, MS 39288-88550

Have a great weekend all and thank you so much for your continued support!

Sondra (and Thalia)

-------------------------------from Facebook site "Free Talia Outlaw"----------------------- 

Description:

Thalia Outlaw is serving life in prison for something she did NOT do. She was convicted in 1999 of murder. In fact, it was self defense in a domestic situation with a man whom she was no longer involved with and who continued to harass and stalk her. The vandalism of her property and physical assaults on her person had become overwhelming for her. Three months pregnant with her youngest child and only daughter, Thalia had moved on and was involved with another man. This did not stop her obsessed ex-boyfriend from continuing to stalk her. On the morning of July 6, 1997, Thalia woke to find her car vandalized and the extra set of keys to her car and home missing AND a flat tire on her vehicle. Knowing who had done this (because he had called and harassed her telling her what he was going to do), she asked a friend to ride with her to retrieve her extra keys from the ex. Thalia did make a mistake that day; she did NOT call the police. But the police had failed her on the prior occasions and having had a similar incident occur approximately a week prior she felt she would be safe and be able to get her keys back without incident. That was not the case. Upon arriving at a mutual friends home, Thalia approached her ex-boyfriend and asked for her keys back. An immediate physical attack on her person began by her ex using a knife. To this day, she carries the scars of those cuts. At some point during the struggle over the knife, the ex received a wound to the upper clavicle area. This did not stop him; he continued to assault her with his fists hitting her in the stomach area raging that he would kill her and her unborn child. The "mutual friend" that was there interceded and the ex-boyfriend left the home and drove to the hospital. Thalia left the home and drove by the hospital in an attempt to have her injuries looked at but seeing the car there of her attacker, she proceeded to the police station to file another assault charge. Thalia never left the police station that day. As she was finishing her report, the call came that the ex boyfriend had died; Thalia was charged with murder and spent 3 days in jail. An individual in the jail recommended an attorney to her; she called and he came to "help". Thalia was told by several investigators and police officers that they knew this was self defense and that she didn't need to worry. Trusting the system to work, Thalia plead NOT GUILTY. After all, how could she be guilty when the alleged weapon was never in her possession? A year and a half later Thalia went to trial. In a day and a half and less than 2 hours of deliberation, Thalia was convicted of murder and sentenced to life. Not one of the prior assault charges were presented to the Court to establish the history of domestic abuse. The missing "weapon" was not available to prove that she never had it in her possession. Further, the many discrepancies in testimony were not pursued by her counsel. In fact, he was chastised during the trial for whistling during court. Having no family in Mississippi to offer support, Thalia has hung on in a Mississippi prison with no help from anyone. Filing her PCR's and appeals, with no information from her case and no copies of the police reports, Thalia has found herself time barred to pursue her innocence. (read less)

Thalia Outlaw is serving life in prison for something she did NOT do. She was convicted in 1999 of murder. In fact, it was self defense in a domestic situation with a man whom she was no longer involved with and who continued to harass and stalk her. The vandalism of her property and physical assaults on her person had become overwhelming for her. Three months pregnant with her youngest child and only daughter, Thalia had moved on and was involved with another man. This did not stop her... (read more)