With funding from a $424,000 federal grant, an unusual alliance of prosecutors and Georgia Innocence Project members spent the past two years examining nearly 3,000 closed cases in which the DNA did not match the person convicted.
It was an ambitious undertaking, believed to be the first of its kind, that some thought would exonerate at least several innocent people in prison.
But thus far, only one person has been discovered behind bars for a crime (burglary) he did not commit. And that man is still incarcerated for another crime (also burglary) that he did commit.
The National Institute of Justice grant ended with the close of 2015 and was not renewed, which means there’s no money to continue paying an attorney and two paralegals to look at cases that the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia referred to the Georgia Innocence Project.
Four cases remain to be reviewed, work that Aimee Maxwell, executive director of the Georgia Innocence Project, said she will have to do herself unless she can recruit volunteer lawyers to finish the endeavor.
For those involved in the project, it was worth the time and money. “We found a case where someone had been wrongfully convicted. Otherwise this would not have been known,” said Christina Cribbs, a contract attorney who worked on the effort.
But for those funding the project, its results are likely a reason why the grant wasn’t renewed.
“They’re looking for more innocent people to be found,” said Chuck Spahos, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council. “With the exception of that one case, all we did was confirm (that the right person was convicted in) all the existing cases. I just don’t think we produced the kind of evidence the federal government wanted.”
A unique process
Georgia records in the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) consist of samples collected when felons enter prison and unidentified samples collected at crime scenes. DNA samples are not taken from suspects upon arrest.
“Nobody else in the country was re-looking at CODIS hits,” Maxwell said.
Defense attorneys don’t ordinarily have access to CODIS data and prosecutors have no reason to check once a case is closed. This was the first time it was done, Maxwell said. “That’s why this is such a unique process.”
The first phase of the grant was to barcode about 45,000 DNA samples from years and years of crime scenes that are now stored in a State Crime Lab vault.
Then there was one
The next phase of the grant was to review 2,890 cases in which DNA collected at crime scenes did not match that of the person convicted. An attorney with the prosecutors council looked for explanations for the discrepancy — the DNA belonged to a co-defendant, or perhaps other evidence supported the conviction — and then sent 73 cases to the Innocence Project for deeper review.
The Innocence Project whittled the list to 27, and a temporary staff attorney and paralegals dug into prosecutors’ records.
That is how they cleared Michael Googe, a career burglar in the Brunswick area, of one of his convictions.
Clearing Michael Googe
Googe, 33, has been arrested 20 times since he was 14. Each time he went to court he pleaded guilty.
There was one burglary, however, that he did not commit, even though he pleaded guilty. Googe said in an interview last fall that he pleaded guilty to burglarizing the Jazz Mart in Brunswick in June 2007 because the prosecutor said it was the only way to avoid a trial and the possibility of a long prison sentence. Googe said he was advised to accept responsibility for that crime along with two crimes he acknowledges he did commit: breaking into the local Greyhound bus station and breaking open the money box at a car wash.
Less than a month after he was sentenced to two years in prison and eight years of probation, the Georgia Crime Lab notified Glynn County prosecutors that the drop of blood left on a money order receipt found in the Jazz Mart register did not belong to Googe.
A year later the lab notified the prosecutor that further analysis of the blood showed it came from the man who told police that Googe had broken into the store, taking three cases of beer and $20 in change.
Changes in the works
Both Crime Lab reports went into Googe’s then-closed file in the district attorney’s office, and nothing more was done.
“It really brings out the need to change the policies” that govern what happens when a prosecutor’s office or a police department receives test results for closed cases, Maxwell said.
Spahos said such changes are in the works. The agency is developing “best practices” for prosecutors and law enforcement to ensure someone reviews Crime Lab reports that come in even after a conviction.
The National Institute of Justice grant was to compare DNA in closed cases and did not include comparing the prosecuting attorneys' records to unsolved cases. But a database has been created that could serve that purpose, Spahos said.
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