The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals yesterday approved nine new habeas corpus petitions from defendants convicted of drug crimes after a Department of Public Safety crime lab worker in Houston was found last year to have falsified test results. That brings the total number of defendants with overturned convictions so far to 11, with many more to come. Those 11 people had been sentenced collectively to 90 years, including one 32-year sentence.
Though there may yet be more instances discovered where ex-lab employee Jonathon Salvador allegedly fabricated results, the habeas petitions granted so far have been in cases where the drug evidence had been destroyed post-conviction and so retesting is impossible. The general counsel at the Texas Forensic Science Commission has estimated evidence has been destroyed in 25-50% of the nearly 5,000 cases from 36 different counties that Mr. Salvador worked on during his time at DPS.
All the habeas writs granted so far have come from Galveston County but that's only because District Attorney Jack Roady's office has been especially diligent about identifying cases where no evidence exists and processing them as promptly as possible. But expect hundreds more people released based on successful writs from other Southeast Texas counties. From what Grits knows of the incident, if I were a betting man I'd put the over-under for how many cases will eventually be overturned at around 1,500. Indeed, that's arguably a conservative estimate.
Extrapolating, the average sentence of the first 11 defendants freed based on this fiasco was just over 8 years. Granted, 11 is a small sample, but if that average holds up and Grits' guesstimate of 1,500 affected defendants comes to fruition, that'd be 12,000 years worth of prison sentences overturned as a result of one, shoddy lab worker!
This incident hasn't received nearly as much publicity as a similar episode in Massachusetts where a discredited "rogue chemist" worked on nearly 40,000 cases over the last decade. In fact, I haven't seen these successful habeas writs covered at all outside of this blog. But it's a pretty darn big deal nonetheless. In all seriousness, there will likely be enough inmates walk out of TDCJ over this SNAFU that, by the time it's done, the Legislature could consider closing an additional prison unit. Mind blowing!
See prior, related Grits posts:
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