Craig’s List
Craig Watkins, the first black district attorney in Dallas County (and, indeed, the state), has a few things on his agenda: rethink the concept of guilt and innocence, review the methods of his own prosecutors, and reinvent his office. And he’s only getting started.
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This is the process that Hill’s ADAs used too, though they were notorious for fighting testing requests—approximately 90 percent of them. Much of the time, their position was understandable; the applications were frivolous (cases where DNA hadn’t been left behind) or doomed (the DNA had been lost). Other times, however, the office’s intransigence was just baffling, such as in the case of Wiley Fountain, the guy convicted of rape back in 1986 after being forced by police to wear a baseball cap in the lineup. No physical evidence had been used to convict him, just the victim’s testimony; why not agree to a DNA test? Of course, when a judge finally ordered one in 2002, Fountain was exonerated.
Watkins changed things immediately. Symbolically, as the reformer, he was lucky. In the first couple of days of his administration, he presided over two exonerations, and a third would follow in April. “All the DNA testing had been done during the Hill administration,” Nina Morrison, a staff attorney with the Innocence Project in New York, told me. “The difference is, Watkins turned those cases around quickly, and he didn’t dispute their innocence. He wasn’t looking for reasons to keep those people in prison.”
As might be expected, the law students are in line with the spirit of the new administration. Of the first eighteen cases they had analyzed as of early August, they had already deemed thirteen appropriate for testing. The official recommendations of the students will go to an oversight committee of prosecutors. Michael Ware, the newly hired special assistant prosecutor, thinks the preliminary vetting will be done by this month. The rest of the process should be completed by Christmas.
Nobody knows exactly what they will find. The 13 exonerations came from 33 tests, but there won’t be anywhere near that ratio out of the 464. Even if you discount one half to three fourths of the requests as unsound, that still leaves potentially 100 to 200 valid ones. Watkins thinks there will be more than 10 exonerations. Michelle Moore thinks it could be 25. Jeff Blackburn, a board member of the Innocence Project of Texas, says, “If we get one hundred tests and half turn out to affirm guilt and half turn out to be innocent, that’s huge.”
And not just in Dallas County. Those thirteen men exonerated by DNA are lucky that they were railroaded in a county that kept its blood and semen evidence. The same kinds of flawed procedures used to convict them, especially those involving mistaken eyewitnesses, have been used for years to convict thousands of other Americans of burglary, kidnapping, assault, rape, and murder, in cases where blood or semen was not kept—or was never found. We used to believe there were only a handful of the falsely convicted; the DNA exonerations have proved us wrong. Dallas County is holding up a mirror to the rest of the American criminal justice system, and the image is grim.
“I really enjoy the speaking part,” Watkins told me after giving another speech, at a drug court graduation in which two dozen men and women—black, white, and brown, from their twenties to their fifties—got their diplomas and listened to the DA talk about the changes he was making. “It’s really exciting when you get up there and you find your voice and people are impressed by it. You think, ‘Man, I got something going on!’” Watkins’s enthusiasm and naiveté are refreshing, whether in front of drug addicts struggling to come clean, real estate agents who voted for his opponent, or hard-core prosecutors accustomed to doing things the old-fashioned way. Even though he came into office with no experience as a prosecutor, he has passionately reinvented the role according to his broader ideas about justice, fairness, and openness.
Watkins told me he is in no hurry to get into the courtroom to prosecute a case. “I’ve got people to do that for me. We need to refocus on what a DA is. With everything we need to change, I need to work on that. I set policy. And I think I do that well.” He spends his days talking to his assistants, the press, and the public. He stops by the office of his title business in Fair Park often. He keeps it for pragmatic reasons, to remind the voters of who he is and also to remind himself of the things it would be easy to forget, down in DeSoto, up on the eleventh floor.
Most reviews of his initial tenure have been positive, especially from the defense bar. “He’s reenergized the office,” Brad Lollar told me, “which energizes our office.” Randy Schaffer, one of Randall Dale Adams’s appellate attorneys, said, “If nothing else, he gets an A for changing the mentality of the place.” Inside the courthouse, Brooks said that the ADAs are following Watkins’s lead. “One or two individuals I’ve had a specific conversation with, but for the most part, all of them have gotten the message.” Damita Sangermano, the head of the grand jury division, said that assistants have welcomed the diversion programs. “Most are about dealing with first-time offenders, and prosecutors see a seventeen-year-old whose life will be ruined by a felony conviction and they wish they had another option. Anytime a prosecutor is given options, that’s a good thing.”
Watkins has plenty of critics too, who think his inexperience will lead to his undoing, who think a DA’s office is not a social welfare experiment, and who told me snarky things like “Dallas County doesn’t have its first black DA, it has its first female DA” or serious things like “He needs to go on the offensive against gangs. We have a big gang problem” (Shook, now in private practice, said that). And Watkins’s first eight months haven’t been entirely smooth. In February the Texas Commission on Jail Standards threatened to shut down the overcrowded county jail unless it drastically reduced its population. The commissioners’ court asked Watkins, Lollar, and local judges to figure out a solution; Lollar proposed plea bargains for low-level felony offenders, regardless of prior criminal record. Watkins agreed, and seven hundred offenders were released. Law-and-order types were furious, and Glenn White told me that some of the freed convicts had since committed more crimes. “It’s frustrating when we put people in jail and they get let out. They’re in jail because they’ve done something wrong, and it’s important for the DA to keep them there.” Still, White is sympathetic with Watkins’s position. “A lot of this isn’t his fault. I think he wants to put bad people in jail, but he can’t because there’s no space. He’s in a no-win situation.”
That same month the Dallas Observer reported that the DA’s office cut a deal for a client of attorney Anthony Lyons, a member of Watkins’s transition team. The client was a cop who had filed a false report with the DeSoto Police Department; a police captain taped a phone call in which a prosecutor said that Lyons had asked for the case to be dismissed. The implication: Watkins was stepping in to help a friend. “It’s bullshit,” Watkins told me. “I had no knowledge of the case. I don’t know what kinds of cases Anthony Lyons has.” (The DeSoto police chief later drove to Watkins’s house to apologize.) Watkins turned the incident into a personal attack. “Every other DA has had friends who were defense attorneys. How many times did you get a police captain complaining about the outcome of a case because an attorney knew Bill Hill or Henry Wade? Never. But it happened to me a month in office. The rules are different.” (Watkins told the New York Times that the whole affair was an attempt to “set up the DA.”)
The Morning News has been relatively supportive, even running an editorial in June that read “We must admit, we’re intrigued” about his “smart on crime” ideas. “Mr. Watkins has taken an aggressive approach to reviewing DNA evidence that could exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners—a strategy that has elevated his national profile and that could help restore confidence in the criminal justice system.” But the editorial went on to ask him to make public some details, benchmarks, and timelines. “That was a slap in the face,” he told me. “‘We want details.’ Well, what kind of details did you get from John Vance and Bill Hill? Whatever I do is always going to get questioned, when you didn’t question the folks who came before. And here I am trying to do the right thing.”
This is the downside of Watkins’s naiveté: He can’t let go of past slights. Yes, his predecessors and opponents were supported by white mainstream Dallas, and he wasn’t. Yes, they were taken more seriously, and he wasn’t. He was an outsider.
But he is no longer. “He has to learn about navigating the political system,” said Royce West. He also has to toughen his skin. Martin Luther King did it, Obama is doing it, and Watkins is going to have to learn too. Especially if he wants to run for higher office, as almost everyone in Dallas believes he will do—or is in fact doing right now. “At this point, that’s not true,” Watkins insisted. But he admits he thinks about it. “The DA is the most powerful person in the county. What you do will directly impact the folks you represent. It’s a good training ground for higher office—if you did want to go. I think everybody’s got a calling, a reason, but few of us live up to that reason. I realize what mine is, and I was given the opportunity to do something about it. Mine is to be a lawyer, to be the DA.”
It’s a conflict he’s had before, between his calling and his ambition. The more he changes the way things are done in Dallas County—the fairer the system becomes, the more exonerations that are found, the more famous he becomes—the more likely that calling is to change again. “Look at the civil rights movement,” he told me, “people like W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, the Kennedys. All those folks who helped make this country what it’s supposed to be. They lived up to what they were put on earth for.
“That’s where I struggle. When people ask, ‘Are you going further?’ I struggle. There’s so much here to do.”
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