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As mentioned yesterday, several of the Dallas County exonerees appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live last night, where they were joined by the stars of the movie Conviction, The Innocence Project’s Barry Sheck and Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins. On the other side you’ll find King’s interviews with several of the wrongly imprisoned, as well as a short CNN feature on Stephen Brodie, who was finally freed last week after the deaf man confessed in 1991 to a sexual assault he didn’t commit.
At the moment, though, there’s no video of Watkins’s appearance, so instead we’ll rely on the transcript.
LARRY KING: Craig Watkins, Dallas County district attorney, what led you to hold on to this, as opposed to other DAs who didn’t?
CRAIG
WATKINS, DALLAS COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY: I was elected as a new DA in
Dallas County in 2006 and took office in 2007. And upon my first week
of entering office, I was requested by a long-time assistant DA to sign
a form to allow all the evidence to be destroyed. And I had practiced
law for a while in Dallas County. And I thought that that was not going
to be a wise decision. So I refused to sign the motion to have that
evidence destroyed.It was probably for the last three years,
as a district attorney for Dallas County, one of the best decisions
that I’ve made. My first week in office there was an exoneration of a
man who had been trying to have his name cleared for five years. And
fortunately I got the opportunity to go downstairs and apologize to
that individual for his wrongful conviction.And I didn’t
think anything of it, I thought it’s the responsibility of the elected
district attorney to restore credibility to the criminal justice
system, to at least give an apology to an individual who had been
wrongfully convicted. And so I did that. And after that, it became a
big media storm as to the fact that I just went down and apologized.Soon
after that, we had someone from the Innocence Project contact us and
said, well, you know, Dallas County has been a haven of wrongful
convictions for years. And this is the opportunity for you …KING: Wow.
WATKINS: … Mr. DA, to look at these cases and make sure it never happens again.
KING: I salute you.
