Another Wrongful Conviction in Houston
Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt insists his department bears no responsibility for Ricardo Rachell's wrongful arrest, conviction, and incarceration. When the police arrested Rachell for sexually assaulting a minor, they recovered physical evidence that could have been tested for DNA. The department's notoriously unreliable crime lab had been closed, so the evidence wasn't tested. Prosecutors didn't order DNA testing and nobody told the defense that the evidence existed.
While Rachell was in jail, the officers involved in his arrest investigated a string of similar assaults in their district. If that fact caused them any concern for Rachell's innocence, they did nothing about it.
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