11 years later, officials agree he’s innocent
Wrong man sent to prison over faulty witness testimony
HOUSTON —James Harris has always maintained his innocence: He wasn’t one of the men police saw fleeing a drug house in northeast Houston in 2009, and the stash inside wasn’t his.
He told the police they had the wrong guy. He told them it was someone else. He refused plea deals, including one for two years. But prosecutors and police didn’t believe him, and neither did a jury that sentenced him to 25 years.
Turns out they did have the wrong guy, authorities now say, a man who looked remarkably like Harris, who had similar tat
toos, and was from the same neighborhood. A judge late last week agreed to recommend the state’s highest criminal court declare Harris innocent and overturn his conviction.
In an interview, a defiant Harris said he was looking forward to getting his life back on track.
“It’s like starting all over,” the 45-year-old northeast Houston man said. “It’s been hell.”
The convoluted case dates back to June 2009, when Houston police officer Chris Aranda and his partner tried to arrest two men they found at a suspected drug house.
The men got away after Aranda spotted them. Inside the house, police found guns, crack cocaine, scales and marijuana.
Two women police stopped at the house identified the two men who had been there as “Man” and “E.”
Court records show police identified Harris as “Man” after officers brought the husband of one of the women to the drug house and told him they were going to pin all the drugs they found on her.
The husband began calling friends and identified
“Man” as James Harris. After seeing Harris’ photograph, Aranda identified him as the man he’d seen but been unable to chase down.
Officers also found a car at the house that was registered to Harris’ sister.
After he learned that police had a warrant out for his arrest, he called them several times, protesting his innocence.
“I told them from the jump, if you can tie me to one thing in this house — fingerprint, a cigarette butt, anything — then I won’t fight you all anymore,” he said.
He told them he wasn’t the guy they were looking for, court records show. He told them he wanted to “clear his name” and give a narcotics officer investigating the case the names of the dealer and suppliers associated with the house.
Harris has served time before after other run-ins with the law — district clerk records show an earlier drug conviction in 2009, a 2003 conviction for evading arrest, a minor drug conviction in 1999 and several incidents in 1994. He acknowledges those, but said he couldn’t tolerate the idea of spending time behind bars for something he hadn’t done.
After police arrested Harris, prosecutors offered him four separate plea deals: 25 years. Then 12, then five, then two. He refused them all. “That would still make me look bad down the line,” he said. “It wasn’t an option.”
After conviction, Harris appealed but was denied in 2011. He filed a writ, seeking to overturn his conviction. That also failed.
Finally, he asked for DNA testing — which was granted — and the Harris County District Attorney’s Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit began reviewing the case.
The testing showed that his DNA was not on any of the evidence.
And the conviction integrity unit — using the city’s gang database — identified another possible suspect: Orlando Noble. Noble resembled Harris, had similar tattoos and his middle name was “Mann.”
A car registered to Noble’s brother was one of two police observed at the house the day of the attempted arrest.
During a court hearing last year, Aranda said he hadn’t known about Noble, and acknowledged he could have been mistaken.
The case is the second actual innocence case District Attorney Kim Ogg has filed in the last year that hinged in part on faulty eyewitness testimony.
“We have a duty to get it right no matter when an injustice has occurred,” she said.
Last year, prosecutors asked another judge to overturn the conviction of Lydell Grant, who was arrested and charged after a fatal stabbing in 2010 where several eyewitnesses to the killing wrongly identified him as the attacker.
In December — a month after Grant was freed from jail — police arrested another man who confessed to that murder.
Harris’ attorney Celeste Blackburn said that in her client’s case, the investigation suffered because of missing information. And she said police erred by not showing the two women they interviewed photos of Harris and that the case highlights the problems with eyewitness testimony.
“This is the hurdle you have to overcome when you are misidentified,” she said.
“We see this a lot, where a police officer develops a suspect and that’s where their focus begins,” she said. “They took the word of someone not at the scene — who they didn’t know who it was to make an identification — with no follow-up with the witnesses at the scene.”
Neither Noble nor Ernest Modeste — the man police believe was “E” — were charged in the case. The statute of limitations has long since run out, Blackburn said.
Now, Harris is trying to get his life together. He spent more than three years in prison before being released. The prospect of another decade on parole, he said, had him constantly on edge.
“They can call you at any moment,” he said. “You can’t close them out. You gotta think of them as your second family.”