Wrongfully convicted man takes city to court
By MARY FLOOD
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
June 16, 2009, 9:25PM
George Rodriguez’s lawyer asked a federal jury Monday to make the city pay “tens of millions of dollars” for the disgraced Houston Police Department’s crime lab’s pivotal role in the wrongful conviction that put his client behind bars for 17 years.
“What was taken away from him was his youth,” said attorney Barry Scheck, whose Innocence Project works on behalf of convicts in similar circumstances. Rodriguez went to prison wrongly at age 26 and walked out at 43 to find his three daughters grown and his father dead, the lawyer said.
In opening statements Tuesday afternoon, Scheck told jurors about the loneliness, fear and depression his client suffered in prison after being wrongly convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl.
This happened, he said, because policy makers at the city of Houston were deliberately indifferent to rampant under funding, under staffing and a lack of supervision at the crime lab that created a high risk an innocent person could be convicted or the guilty one could go free.
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