Michael Phillips Evidence Of Exoneration

In 1990, Michael Phillips was convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl at a motel in Dallas, Texas.. Phillips pleaded guilty because, he said later, his attorney told him that as a black man who had been accused of raping a white teenager that he should try to avoid a jury trial. He went to prison for 12 years and, after his release, spent another six months in jail after failing to register as a sex offender.

Phillips’s name is being cleared. he didn’t even realize it was happening.Alot of people have been exonerated through DNA testing, with 317 such post-conviction exonerations since 1989, according to the Innocence Project. This week, the office of Craig Watkins, the Dallas County district attorney, announced that Phillips, 57, was going

He is the first person exonerated by a prosecutor’s office without doing these things, according to Watkins’s office and the National Registry of Exonerations.

“This is different from other exonerations…in a very important way,” said Samuel R. Gross, editor of the National Registry of Exonerations and a law professor at the University of Michigan. “The man who was exonerated, this wasn’t on his mind. He wasn’t thinking about it, he hadn’t thought about it.”

Instead, the first he heard about it was when someone from the Conviction Integrity Unit contacted him, Gross said. That unit was established by Watkins’s office in 2007 to review and investigate claims of innocence and other old cases. (Gross worked with the conviction integrity group and suggested the project that eventually resulted in Phillips’s exoneration.)

As part of the ongoing effort to review untested rape kits — without waiting for the convicted people to request such reviews — evidence from the 1990 rape was run through the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, which identified a different person as the actual rapist, Watkins said in a