Prosecutors: Police had evidence implicating another in '82 rape

DA joins fight to clear man
By STEVE McGONIGLE and ROBERT THARP
The Dallas Morning News
Feb. 25, 2007

The Dallas County district attorney's office said Thursday that a man sent to prison for a 1982 gang rape was wrongly convicted and that it will join his attorneys' request to have his name cleared.

Prosecutors now acknowledge that Dallas police had evidence that would have implicated another man but did not turn it over to defense attorneys.

Attorneys for James Curtis Giles asked state District Judge Robert Francis on Thursday to find that Mr. Giles was not one of three men who savagely assaulted an 18-year-old woman in Far North Dallas.

Mr. Giles, his attorneys contend, spent 10 years in prison for a crime their investigation shows was committed by another man with an almost identical name who was a known associate of the two attackers identified by DNA evidence.

Evidence that identified James Earl Giles as the true rapist was given to Dallas police before James Curtis Giles' 1983 trial but never disclosed to his trial attorney, a violation of laws requiring exculpatory evidence to be produced.

First Assistant District Attorney Terri Moore said Dallas police did not forward sworn statements made two weeks before Mr. Giles' trial that implicated "James," a teenager with a violent history who lived across the street from the rape victim.

With DNA testing and other new evidence presented by the Innocence Project of New York, Ms. Moore said she concurs that Mr. Giles was unjustly convicted.

Mr. Giles' case would bring the county's total DNA-related exonerations to 13 over the last six years, all but two of which were prosecuted under District Attorney Henry Wade. No other county in the nation has more.

No date was set for a court hearing, but prosecutors and Mr. Giles' attorneys said they expected one within the next two weeks.

"Apparently, it was a real complicated, squirrelly case," Ms. Moore said. "Two guys shared the same name, and it sounds like it's a total mess. They [prosecutors] think it was a case of mistaken identification."

When final, the exoneration will be the third since District Attorney Craig Watkins took office Jan. 1. Mr. Watkins has said he is committed to freeing anyone wrongly convicted as a means of restoring credibility to the prosecutor's office.

Last week, his office said it had agreed to a partnership with the Innocence Project of Texas to double-check applications for DNA tests filed by more than 350 convicted people since enactment of a 2001 state law that permitted such tests.

The Innocence Project of New York, which has helped to clear dozens of people around the country through DNA testing, began actively investigating Mr. Giles' case more than six years ago after receiving repeated pleas from him.

His unique identification problem earned the title "the case of the wrong James Giles," said Vanessa Potkin, a staff attorney who led the defense effort.

The case also stood out, Ms. Potkin said, because of a police investigation that she described as the sloppiest she has encountered in her work across the country.

"There has been no interest in getting to the truth of his case, even though the truth has been sitting there all along," she said. "The true perpetrator was across the street. So literally the truth of the case has been staring everyone in the face for the last 20 years."

The rape that changed the course of Mr. Giles' life took place on Aug. 1, 1982, in an apartment near Spring Valley and Coit roads. Three men entered the apartment in an apparent drug-related robbery and repeatedly raped the female resident.

The victim immediately identified one of her attackers as Stanley Gay Bryant, a man she had seen around the neighborhood. Mr. Bryant left Dallas soon after the attack but was subsequently arrested on a murder charge in Indiana.

Mr. Giles, a married construction worker from Duncanville, was arrested six months after the rape victim selected his photo from a six-man lineup. At the time, he was on probation for the attempted murder of a co-worker.

Police placed Mr. Giles in the lineup after receiving an anonymous tip that "James Giles" committed the rape along with "Michael Brown" and "Stan." James Giles also was identified as "Quack," a nickname by which James Earl Giles was known.

"Quack" Giles was never arrested for the rape. He died of cancer in 2000 while in state prison for an aggravated assault and robbery committed in the 1990s.

The victim never identified the third assailant, but he was identified by DNA tests as Michael Anthony Brown, a close friend of James Earl Giles. Mr. Brown died in jail in Tyler in 1985 after being convicted of another gang rape.

The Innocence Project identified Mr. Brown as one of the assailants last summer after obtaining a DNA sample from his father and comparing it to rape kit evidence. The test identified a male chromosome that can only be passed from father to son.

At trial, the victim again identified James Curtis Giles despite conceding that she had initially told police her attacker was a younger, shorter man. She also acknowledged that she did not notice her attacker had gold teeth, as James Curtis Giles did.

Mr. Giles and his wife testified that he was asleep at home 25 miles away when the rape occurred. There was no physical evidence linking him to the attack.

A jury found him guilty and assessed his punishment at 30 years in prison.

The jury never heard that Mr. Bryant told Indianapolis police that the rape was committed by two teenagers named Michael and James whom he described as casual acquaintances. He gave detailed descriptions of both and a home phone number for Michael.

Mr. Bryant agreed to testify against the co-defendants, but he was never called.

According to Mr. Bryant's statement, Indianapolis police conducted two interviews with him in May 1983 at the request of Dallas police Detective Carol Hovey and "Mr. O'Connor," who was described as a prosecutor in Mr. Giles' case.

Other court records identify Ms. Hovey as the chief investigator in the Giles case. The lead prosecutor was Mike O'Connor.

Ms. Hovey is retired. Mr. O'Connor left the district attorney's office for private law practice in the mid-1980s. Neither could be reached Thursday.

The jury foreman, a Baptist minister, said jurors struggled with the case during two days of deliberations. After the trial, the foreman recalled that the prosecutor in the case visited with them and reassured them that they had put away a dangerous man.

"You hold a man's life in your hands," said the foreman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "You pray, you deliberate, you think. If we convicted an innocent man ... I'd give anything to change it."

Mr. Bryant's statement was not disclosed to Mr. Giles until Dallas prosecutors provided it to the Innocence Project in August 2003, Ms. Potkin said.

Repeated attempts by Mr. Giles to overturn his conviction failed. He was able to persuade Dallas prosecutors to reinvestigate his case in the early 1990s, but the effort fizzled when the victim remained adamant and a DNA test proved inconclusive.

Improvements in DNA technology permitted the Innocence Project to identify two distinctive genetic profiles from the rape evidence. One profile was identified as that of Mr. Bryant, the other as that of Mr. Brown.

For three years, the Innocence Project tried to test a sleeping bag from the victim's bed for the presence of "Quack" Giles' semen, but prosecutors under then-District Attorney Bill Hill said the tests would be inconclusive because the bag was "a party blanket," Ms. Potkin said.

Prosecutors revealed in December that the sleeping bag was destroyed by Dallas police three years earlier despite an order that it be preserved.

Mr. Giles was released from prison in 1993. He now lives in Lufkin and works in the bail bond business. He is on parole until 2013 and must register as a sex offender.

He could not be reached for comment Thursday. Ms. Potkin said he would have no comment until his exoneration hearing.