THESE STEPS WILL LEAD TO A SYSTEM WITH FEWER ERRORS
We must learn from our past mistakes and invest in the possibility of uncovering future wrongful convictions.
In 1998, Horace Roberts was wrongfully convicted of murder. He was a successful manager at Qwest Diagnostics in Oceanside and had never been in trouble with the law before. The conviction was based on circumstantial evidence, including his extramarital affair with Terry Cheek, a woman he supervised at Qwest, who was divorcing her husband, Googie Harris Sr. She had been staying at the Riverside home with her children and needed to show she still lived there to stake a claim in the divorce. She used Roberts’ truck to drive to the house and would then drive south to Temecula to pick up Robert, who would lie about his relationship with her to his co-workers.
On April 14, 1998, Cheek left the Riverside house for work and never arrived. Three days later, her body was found near where the California Highway Patrol had tagged Roberts’ truck. The investigation focused on Roberts and Harris, but Harris had a perfect alibi, while Roberts did not. Investigators found a watch at the crime scene that they believed belonged to Roberts, and he was ultimately convicted of murder after three jury trials. But DNA testing requested in 2007 and completed in 2011 showed that Roberts’ DNA was not on the watch found at the crime scene. Instead, the DNA on the watch belonged to Harris Sr.’s son, Googie Harris Jr. Despite this development, Roberts remained in prison based on the current state of the law.
Not long after finding out the watch had Harris’ son’s DNA on it, I represented Roberts for his parole hearing. Harris Sr. attended and opposed Roberts’ parole. Because we lost on parole and lost in court, we went back to the drawing board. Additional DNA testing in 2016-2017 connected Harris Sr.’s nephew to the crime scene, leading to Roberts’ exoneration, and the arrest of Harris Sr., his nephew Joaquin Leal, and his son, Harris Jr.
How do we avoid this going forward? There are many recurring problems that show up in wrongful conviction cases.
For one, the jury may get it wrong. We put a lot of faith in the jury system, but at the end of the day, the jury can and does get it wrong. If we continue to employ such a system, we should expect this to be the result. We cannot expect jurors to have a perfect understanding of, say, physics before they sit on a jury. We also cannot expect juries to become experts in physics after hearing several hours of testimony. Finally, we cannot expect juries to rely on the circumstantial evidence of a case and then not allow the criminal legal system to correct for errors when the evidence changes, or when new information comes to light.
This brings me to my next point — the new evidence standard set by the Legislature in 2016. There is still a belief in the finality of judgments across the country. While it is true that during Roberts’ appeals, California updated its standard for reversing a conviction based on new evidence, making it in line with the rest of the country, it is still very hard to reverse a wrongful conviction.
Why should that be the case when we now know wrongful convictions are much more common than once thought? If the goal is the pursuit of justice through truth, then we can and should make it as easy as possible for a court to consider all information that may point to that truth. We should save all evidence. There are still state and local agencies in California that are purging physical evidence from criminal cases. In fact, just a couple of years ago, the San Diego Superior Court moved to its new location, and in the process of the move, the court sought to get rid of all court exhibits housed at the old courthouse. The San Diego County Public Defender Office, the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office and the California Innocence Project worked to come up with a set of parameters to ensure court exhibits that may contain biological evidence not get destroyed.
But the fact that we had to address this goes to show the criminal legal system still does not fully appreciate the importance of evidence preservation, regardless of what its costs may be. We do not know the future of forensic science or of the ability to obtain information from crime scene evidence. We must learn from our past mistakes and invest in the possibility of uncovering future wrongful convictions.
Lastly, we must continue to advance forensic sciences. Had DNA testing not improved, Horace would not be free, and the true perpetrators would have gotten away with it. Those advances as well as the elimination of the use of junk science will lead us to a criminal legal system with fewer errors.