Even the Blind Now See Light On Criminal Injustice

Who kidnapped the Harris County District Attorney and replaced him with this guy calling himself Chuck Rosenthal? You would think if someone were going to play such a public role, he would have at least studied his subject a little more closely.

Instead, the completely unprepared impostor walked into a courtroom and apologized to someone who had been wrongly imprisoned for 14 years. Like anyone is going to seriously believe that Chuck Rosenthal would say something like, “I feel awful. Nobody wants to have an innocent person wrongfully convicted and sent to prison.”

But no missing person report has been filed, and observers swear that really was the district attorney apologizing to Ronald Gene Taylor after DNA testing cleared the 47-year-old of rape charges.

Please pardon those of us who found the new Rosenthal a bit hard to accept. After all, this is the same guy who in 2004 was looking for a way to retry George Rodriguez even after DNA analysis and testimony from a co-defendant showed that the Houston man had been wrongly imprisoned as a rapist for 17 years. It was the Rodriguez case that left me quite disturbed and grasping for answers.

When I was a courthouse news reporter, Rosenthal was one of my best sources of information. He was then a top-notch senior prosecutor, and if he was assigned a case, it was usually rather serious and newsworthy in nature. He also had a firm grasp of what was happening around the courthouse and on more than one occasion, he led me toward a great story.

Time passed, jobs changed and we lost contact, but as fate would have it, our paths would cross in a rather interesting fashion in 2004. State Sen. Rodney Ellis asked me to take part in a news conference about the Rodriguez case, problems with the Houston crime lab and the work of the Innocence Project in Texas.

That same night, I happened to run into Rosenthal at the Astros game and told him I had participated in the news conference. Full of bravado regarding Rodriguez, he responded, “He’s good for that case.” That meant that despite all the scientific evidence, Rosenthal still refused to accept the man’s innocence.

For months, I would joke that I didn’t know convicting innocent people was a partisan issue; I had always assumed both parties were against that until the Republican Rosenthal convinced me otherwise. But I stopped using the joke for what I think was a very good reason: It wasn’t funny; it was disheartening and almost sickening.

Of course, we should all be against convicting innocent people and horribly disturbed by the cases that keep coming to light across Texas involving just that. It should have nothing to do with being a Republican or Democrat and everything to do with being a decent human being. Our great lust to appear law and order-minded in Texas shouldn’t blind us to simple right and wrong.

Rosenthal was blinded. Now let’s hope this pre-election year conversion is an honest one and that his eyes will remain open.

(Originally published by Examiner Newspaper Group)