Dear Diane,
We had a guest speaker in Professional Responsibility this afternoon. His name was Timothy Durham. In 1991, Durham was accused of a horrendous rape/murder of an 11 year old girl and was convicted on some shoddy evidence. He looked similar to the person who committed the crime and shared some DNA markers with hair samples found at the scene. He'd had some run ins with the law before, but never anything violent; He'd never been to jail. Another person of interest killed himself before police could even get to him. On top of everything, he wasn't even in Tulsa the weekend of the murder; He was at a skeet shooting competition in Dallas with his parents. 11 witnesses testified to seeing him in Dallas that weekend.
Due to a lot of issues in the defense, Durham was still convicted of all 8 counts he faced and was sentenced to in astonishing 3220 YEARS in prison. He served almost 4 years for those crimes before DNA evidence showed that he wasn't the killer.
End of the day, it was a sloppy defense by a veteran lawyer that sent an innocent man to jail for crimes that there was more than enough evidence to show he wasn't even in the state to commit. It was an eye opening look at what happens when lawyers don't take their job seriously enough and take a slam dunk win for granted.
Time to swallow hard and hit the books. I can't settle for just 'good enough' anymore.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment