Man Freed After 12 Years in Texas Prison for Wrongful Molestation Convicti

[seriousstan]

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - Texas officials freed a man who spent 12 years in prison after he was wrongfully convicted of molesting a 3-year-old girl.
John Michael Harvey, 40, was released Friday after the state Court of Criminal Appeals ruled 5-4 on Wednesday there was not enough evidence to convict him after his alleged victim recanted more than a decade after he was jailed. Prosecutors have said they do not plan to seek a new trial.

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A few years ago, the alleged victim found out that Harvey was in prison. She had been too traumatized from testifying as a child to realize what had happened.

The teenager told a relative she had been coerced into lying to authorities. With renewed hope that Harvey could be cleared, his Houston attorney, Sean Buckley, presented the new evidence at a March hearing in Fort Worth, where the girl denied that Harvey molested her. The girl's brother testified that he remembered the girl being coached by a relative who had a long-standing grudge against Harvey.

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGB93HVCM2E.html

[genieroze]

1. Throw the relative in jail. eom

[arwalden]

6. Apparently The Woman Who Coached Her To Lie Is Dead.

[MidwestTransplant]

2. One of the worst things is that the decision was 5-4

can you imagine how many innocent people who have been executed in that state.

[American Renaissance]

3. ghouls

I saw an interview on British Television a few years ago with this texas appeals judge, and she said that she only considered DNA evidence that proved guilt.

Extremely ghoulish woman, gives real insight to the quality of texas justice.

[George_S]

4. The prosecutor's tactics

As the first week drew to a close in an unusual hearing to determine whether Stoll should get a new trial or win his freedom, the prosecutor's strategy became clear: Make the witnesses look like liars, opportunists and social outcasts. The court battle shows that even two decades later, the infamous child molestation investigation that, along with Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, helped put Bakersfield on the map refuses to go away. Years later, the cases are still upending people's lives.

The prosecutor's tactics, meanwhile, are enraging Stoll's attorneys.

"This is just a continuation of what went on in 1985," fumed Kathleen Ridolfi, executive director of Santa Clara University's Northern California Innocence Project. Project attorneys, along with the California Innocence Project at the California Western School of Law in San Diego, are representing Stoll.

"For them to continue to badger these young men after what they went through as children is just outrageous," Ridolfi said.

Even Stoll, sweating out his own future, expressed outrage in a jail interview. "They're picking on those kids again," he said. "Why can't they just leave them alone?"

Besides being risky, the prosecution strategy is replete with irony. Those who are targeted are the same people who, two decades earlier, were portrayed by the district attorney's office as tender victims of a vast interlocking network of child abusers and pornographers.

Stoll was one of more than 40 people convicted in the eight Bakersfield cases that began in 1984, one of the first of the wave of multi-offender molestation cases that swept the nation in the 1980s and '90s.

http://www.injusticebusters.com/04/Bakersfield_Calif.htm

[St. Jarvitude]

5. He survived 12 years in prison on a molestation rap

I'm actually amazed he lived long enough in prison to be released.