Cornelius Dupree with his wife Selman Perkins. Photo courtesy of the AP and The Innocence Project
Cornelius Dupree Jr., sentenced to 75 years in prison in 1980 for the rape and robbery of a 26-year-old Dallas woman a year earlier, was the latest to be declared innocent Tuesday after spending 30 years in prison. Dupree, who always maintained his innocence, holds the dubious distinction of having served more time in prison for a crime he didn’t commit than any other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.
He is the 21st inmate exonerated by DNA evidence in Dallas County, which maintains biological evidence decades after a conviction. Craig Watkins, the Dallas County DA, and the first black district attorney in Texas history, has cooperated with innocence groups in reviewing hundreds of requests by inmates for DNA testing. Watkins has reversed what he calls “a convict-at-all-costs mentality” that he says permeated his office before he arrived in 2007.
Dupree spent over half his life behind bars because of mistaken identification, which is not unusual considering 75% of wrongful convictions of people later cleared by DNA evidence resulted from misidentifications, according to the Innocence Project. They recommend that all law enforcement agencies be required to have written policies for identification procedures based on scientific research on eyewitness memory to increase accuracy and reliability.
A Department of Justice study found that even the most experienced officer could inadvertently give subconscious hints to the witness to identify the suspect, resulting in false identification. Thus, an officer who doesn’t know the identity of the suspect should conduct the line-up. Also, under traditional simultaneous lineups, some witnesses will inadvertently begin to compare photos to one another, or persons in live lineups, instead of comparing one photo or one person to their memory. Consequently, the identifications are not as reliable as those conducted sequentially. Photos or persons should be viewed one at a time and presented in random order.
Fortunately for Cornelius Dupree, Texas also has the most generous compensation laws for the wrongly imprisoned in the country. He is eligible for $80,000 for each year he was behind bars, plus a lifetime annuity. He could receive $2.4 million in a lump sum that is not subject to federal income tax. The Texas Legislature passed the compensation law in 2009, after dozens of wrongly convicted men were released from prison. But I’ll bet if you asked him, no amount of money could ever compensate for the thirty lost years of his life.