By Roma Khanna
The Houston Chronicle
HOUSTON, Texas — More than 150 inmates whose convictions may be based on faulty Houston crime lab evidence have asked that their cases be reviewed, a judge said Thursday.
Since Oct. 22, Judge Mary Bacon, a retired state district judge overseeing the review of 180 convictions with flawed blood-typing evidence, has conducted hearings with all inmates currently incarcerated in those cases. Of 160 inmates contacted at various Texas prisons via video conferences, all but four agreed to have their cases reviewed.
The hearings are the first step in a plan that Harris County’s 22 criminal state district judges developed last month to review cases with problematic blood-typing evidence from the Houston Police Department’s crime lab.
A team will review the 156 cases to determine how essential HPD’s analyses were to securing the convictions, according to attorney Bob Wicoff. Wicoff will be joined by two other lawyers, who should be named next week, and volunteers including other lawyers, students and academics.
“I am trying to marshal all the help I can get for this undertaking,” said Wicoff, who represented Josiah Sutton, the first man exonerated in the HPD crime lab scandal.
The team will contact defendants they have not yet reached.
Lawyers are expected to report to Bacon in early December on who has been assigned to what case and what progress has been made.
“With past reviews of the DNA cases, it just laid around and lawyers let some cases linger,” Wicoff said. "(Bacon) wants to avoid that and regularly measure our progress.”
The review of these 180 serology cases is the latest in a string of reviews of work from the HPD crime lab, which has been under scrutiny since 2002 when news reports and an audit exposed errors in the crime lab’s DNA analyses.
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle