Judge overturns man's child rape conviction

[ComputerLover]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39385473/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/


DALLAS — A judge on Monday overturned the 1993 conviction of a deaf man who was sent to prison for raping a 5-year-old girl despite an absence of physical evidence linking him to the attack.

The district attorney's office supported Stephen Brodie's claim that he is innocent during the hearing in a Dallas courtroom.

Brodie has been deaf since childhood, but police questioned him about the attack for hours without an interpreter. He eventually confessed, but later said his confession was made under duress.

When a judge ruled the confession was admissible at trial, Brodie and his attorney figured a guilty verdict, which was punishable by up to 99 years, was all but certain. So they cut a deal — pleading guilty to assaulting the girl in exchange for a five-year prison sentence. After serving that sentence, Brodie served two more prison stints totaling five more years for twice failing to register as a sex offender.

Michelle Moore, Brodie's current attorney, says prosecutors failed to notify Brodie's trial attorney that testing showed hair found at the crime scene excluded Brodie as the source.

A year after Brodie's conviction, police learned that a fingerprint found on a window at the girl's home matched that of Robert Warterfield, who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in 1994. Warterfield also was suspected in six other sexual assaults and five attempted assaults of young girls in the Dallas area.

Warterfield, who is free and working for a yard service in Stephenville, according to the state sex offender registry, was never charged in the attack for which Brodie served time. District Attorney Craig Watkins said after the hearing that his office is investigating Warterfield and that the statute of limitations has not expired.

Warterfield appeared at Brodie's hearing Monday and invoked the Fifth Amendment, declining to provide testimony that might incriminate himself.



Richardson police discounted the Warterfield print as coincidence, saying Warterfield "somehow touched the frame when he was wandering around in the neighborhood four days prior to this offense," according to police records.

In a 1994 appeal, Brodie's attorney cited the fingerprint on the window. But a judge denied the appeal, ruling that Brodie's confession outweighed the fingerprint evidence.

Brodie was originally arrested in 1991 for stealing quarters from a vending machine at a community swimming pool. While he was being questioned about that, police began questioning him about the rape of the 5-year-old girl.

Moore says Brodie was made a scapegoat in the early 1990s, when police were under pressure to make arrests in more than a dozen sexual assaults of young girls in the north Dallas area.

Dallas County has exonerated 20 wrongly convicted people in recent years through DNA testing — more than any other county nationally and all but two states. But the Brodie case does not involve DNA. Instead, it is the county's first potential exoneration involving a false confession, Moore said.

Brodie is the second exoneration case in two years involving Richardson police. The first was Thomas McGowan, who was freed in 2008 after serving 23 years of a life sentence for a rape he did not commit.

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[Miss-Delectable]

Judge exonerates deaf man wrongly convicted in 1990 sex assault of Richardson girl

Judge exonerates deaf man wrongly convicted in 1990 sex assault of Richardson girl | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Dallas-Fort Worth Crime News | Dallas-Fort Worth News

A deaf man wrongly convicted in the 1990 sexual assault of a Richardson girl is a step closer to freedom after a state district judge cleared his name today.

Stephen Brodie, 39, pleaded guilty to the crime in 1993 in exchange for a five-year sentence in the attack on the 5-year-old girl, who was abducted from her home and forced to perform a sex act.

After his plea, Brodie's attorneys learned that a fingerprint found on window matched a suspected serial rapist who was convicted of a similar crime and that a hair found on the girl's blanket did not match Brodie or anyone in the girl's family.

Brodie said in an interview that he never doubted that he would be exonerated.

"I could feel God has already set up a time that I would be released," Brodie said through an American Sign Language interpreter after the judge declared his innocence.

If the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals approves today's ruling by State District Judge Lena Levario, Brodie will become the third man in Dallas County cleared without DNA evidence.

Brodie sat almost expressionless through a hearing that lasted more than three hours today. But when Levario began saying listing items that she agreed showed he did not commit the crime, Brodie began to smile.

He wiped away tears when Levario found him innocent.

It is unclear whether prosecutors knew about the print match and hair and did not tell Brodie's attorney. Police say they turned over all information to the district attorney's office. Information that could benefit a defendant is legally required to be handed over following a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brady vs. Maryland.

Brodie has served his sentence for the sex crime, but he was convicted in Lamar County for failing to register as a sex offender. Lamar County District Attorney Gary Young said he would ask a judge to overturn that conviction so that Brodie could be released from jail.

At today's hearing, witnesses testified that a comment Brodie wrote to police on day two of an eight-day interrogation was not a confession.

When asked in writing by police why he abducted and sexually assaulted the girl, Brodie wrote "I don't know WHY?"

Amber D.F. Elliott, a lawyer who is also fluent in American Sign Language, testified that in the deaf community those words mean, "I said, 'I don't know why.' "

Elliott said his words should not have been taken as a confession. Levario agreed.

There were other problems with the investigation, including the fact that police told Brodie details of the crime.

Even with police telling him the time of day the crime happened, details of how the attacker got into the home and what he did, Brodie incorrectly described the crime to police. Only two of the 45 details Brodie provided were correct.

Moore said Brodie was interrogated for 18 hours by Richardson police, and only half of the time was there a sign language interpreter present. She said he also confessed to a crime that Dallas police made up when they were questioning him, a point that would raise doubts about whether his confession to an actual crime was legitimate.

Brodie's father, J. Steve Brodie, waited outside the Dallas County Jail this afternoon for his son to be released. He said he never doubted his son's innocence.

"I knew it," he said. "I was positive of it, but there wasn't anything I could do about it."

Even so, the father was instrumental in his son's release, writing letters to groups all over the country seeking help for his son. The solution came when the Dallas County district attorney's office read his letter and began an investigation.

Brodie would be the second exoneration in Richardson and the second Dallas County case where a defendant was exonerated after falsely confessing to a crime. The county also has 20 DNA exonerations – more than any other county in the nation since 2001 when Texas began allowing post-conviction genetic testing.