The 49-year-old’s freedom wasn’t granted because he had finally paid his debt to society or due to a technicality. In fact, society was now indebted to Santillan. After a quarter century in prison, Santillan had been fully exonerated, validating the claims of innocence he had made all along. He had been released from jail in December, but had been waiting for the day he was finally called “innocent.”
Not only did DNA evidence testing finally prove Santillan did not murder Whittman in 1997, police were able to pinpoint and arrest a new suspect connected to DNA police say belongs to the true murderer.
Santillan is free after a lengthy collaboration between Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey-based innocence organization, and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU). Formed in 2007, the CIU focuses on reviewing convictions where claims of innocence are made and the possibility of systematic errors might exist. There have been 43 exonerations in Dallas County since 2001.
“It remains our job to correct past wrongs, which is what the CIU team in my office worked tirelessly to do,” said Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot upon Santillan’s exoneration. “We owe it to Mr. Santillan to clear his name fully and completely. I sincerely apologize to Mr. Santillan and his family for this miscarriage of justice and I am proud to say that today justice has been done for him.”
Centurion and the Dallas County CIU began working together on Santillan’s case in 2008. A spokesperson for the Dallas County DA’s office said the office had also worked with Centurion to free and then exonerate Richard Miles in 2012 after he was wrongfully convicted of murder and attempted murder in 1995.
The spokesperson added that the CIU is working with Centurion to exonerate Ben Spencer. That case is currently pending before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals following Spencer's release from prison in 2021 by a judge who ruled he had received an unfair murder trial in 1987.
"If you’re not persistent, you shouldn’t be doing this kind of work." – Paul Casteleiro, Centurion Ministries
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Santillan was convicted on the basis of a single eyewitness who picked him out of a photo lineup. Santillan contended that he had been in Deep Ellum on the night of Whittman’s murder. but had stayed in a bar a good distance away from the spot Whittman was shot, including during the time that the shooting occurred. He had a number of people affirm his alibi. He also wasn't known to have owned or worn a Dallas Stars hockey jersey, which witnesses say the shooter was wearing and which was later found near the crime scene by police.
There was no physical evidence tying Santillan to the murder That none of the other few witnesses picked Santillan out of the photo lineup or that the witness who did ID him admitted he had been drinking all day prior to the shooting didn’t seem to sway the jury.
Paul Casteleiro, Centurion’s legal director and the lead attorney for Santillan, said Dallas County was a ready and willing partner in the case for years, but especially when it came time to follow a new path in Santillan’s case in 2021.
“They responded the day I sent them an email,” Casteleiro said. “I was blown away. I was really quite surprised by that. They replied with an email right back to me saying ‘OK, we’ll do it.’”
The “it” Casteleiro referred to was the reopening of the investigation. For about seven years, Santillan sat in prison with little hope of ever getting out after appeals had failed and other DNA testing had come up empty. It looked like his life sentence was going to stick.
In the eyes of Dallas County, the case was closed out in 2014. But Centurion had been working on Santillan’s case since 2008, and DNA testing and mapping in 2021 was far more advanced than it had been in previous years when what the Dallas County DA called “forensic limitations” prevented any new conclusions from being made.
A new type of test was encouraging, but Santillan and the Centurion staff had gotten their hopes up before.
“If you’re not persistent, you shouldn’t be doing this kind of work. It requires a certain kind of persistence that's aggravating,” Casteleiro said. “To be quite honest, there are more lows than there are highs in these cases because you’re constantly having doors shut in your face and you gotta just keep picking yourself back up. I’m a fairly well-trained lawyer, so it’s different, but I can’t imagine what the ups and downs are like for the inmate. It’s got to be just horrible.” (Casteleiro said that neither Santillan nor his family members, would grant interviews.)
Casteleiro had become familiar with a lab in California that was able to obtain good DNA results from garments. Sending a sample out there for testing was worth a shot.
“No one had ever tested Santillan to see if the one DNA profile [on the jersey] could’ve been his,” the attorney said. “I had Martin send me some toilet paper with his saliva on it, and I sent that to California. They tested it, got a profile from it and he was eliminated from that allele, so that was a good start. We presented that to Cynthia Garza at the CIU and they readily agreed to do further DNA testing.”
Casteleiro felt hopeful about Santillan’s case in August 2021. The clear proof that Santillan’s DNA was not on the hockey jersey and that DNA of two other people were detected on it cleared things up tremendously for Centurion. At that point, simply getting Santillan released from prison wasn’t enough. Casteleiro and his team wanted complete exoneration.
The DNA evidence was “pretty significant,” according to Casteleiro, and it led police to locate and arrest a new suspect in Colorado. The new suspect has yet to be named publicly because, according to police, he was a minor when the murder took place. Over the course of “20 something exonerations” Casteleiro has worked on, he hasn’t had one where a different suspect is arrested and charged for the crime his client was being cleared of. “It’s indeed rare,” he said.
During his short remarks in front of the courthouse on the day he was exonerated, Santillan was asked what was in his future as a free, innocent man.
“Smiles,” he said with a chuckle. “A whole bunch of smiles.”
