12th Dallas Inmate Exonerated by DNA
James Waller was convicted in 1982 of raping a 12 year old boy. He spent almost half his life in prison before his parole in 1993.
A court decision yesterday declared him innocent, based on DNA evidence.
Waller is the 12th exoneration in Dallas.
“Nowhere else in the nation have so many individual wrongful convictions been proven in one county in such a short span,” said Barry C. Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, the legal clinic that championed Mr. Waller’s case. In fact, Mr. Scheck said, those 12 such instances are more than have occurred anywhere else except the entire states of New York and Illinois since the nation’s first DNA exoneration, in 1989.
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