DA in murder case says man is innocent
It’s probably only a matter of time before Texas’ courts declare Steven Mark Chaney’s innocence in a murder case that used faulty evidence to convict him.
The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office now agrees, as does the former prosecutor who sought the conviction, that there is no way Chaney should have been convicted or even indicted in the 1987 stabbing deaths of John and Sally Sweek.
At a hearing Tuesday, the former prosecutor, Neil Pask, testified that although he believed that bite mark evidence in the case linked Chaney to the crime at the time of the trial, he now believes it to be bad science, Chaney’s attorney Julie Lesser said.
The case was already on its way to dismissal, but it faced a long path through the Texas court system. The effort just got a little easier: The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in Texas, is likely to side with Chaney and the district attorney’s office and declare him “actually innocent.”
To Chaney, the move means people are acknowledging he didn’t do it, said Lesser, a Dallas County public defender who worked on the case with the Innocence Project in New York.
It has bothered Chaney that previously “it sounded like he got off on a technicality,” Lesser said. “He wants his name cleared.”
Patricia Cummings, the head of conviction integrity at the DA’s office, said that when Pask testified that he now believes Chaney is innocent, it was “a pleasant surprise. I admired him for doing it. It took a lot of guts.”
“I think he wanted to publicly apologize.”
Pask could not be reached for comment.
The district attorney’s office is again investigating the death of the Sweeks to determine the true killer. The office has found “quite a bit of evidence pointing to other perpetrators,” Cummings said. But no arrests have been made.
Chaney, a 60-year-old former construction worker, was released in October after serving nearly 30 years behind bars. State District Judge Dominique Collins brought him pumpkin pie to celebrate that day.