Wrongfully jailed man sues Houston, seeks millions Wrongfully convicted man takes city to court

George Rodriguez leaves from the Federal Courthouse with supporters, Rodriguez is suing the city of Houston over a 1987 rape conviction. George Rodriguez leaves from the Federal Courthouse with supporters, Rodriguez is suing the city of Houston over a 1987 rape conviction. Photo: Billy Smith II Photo: Billy Smith II Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Wrongfully jailed man sues Houston, seeks millions 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

George Rodriguez’s lawyer asked a federal jury Monday to make the city pay “tens of millions of dollars” for the disgraced Houston Police Department’s crime lab’s pivotal role in the wrongful conviction that put his client behind bars for 17 years.

“What was taken away from him was his youth,” said attorney Barry Scheck, whose Innocence Project works on behalf of convicts in similar circumstances. Rodriguez went to prison wrongly at age 26 and walked out at 43 to find his three daughters grown and his father dead, the lawyer said.

In opening statements Tuesday afternoon, Scheck told jurors about the loneliness, fear and depression his client suffered in prison after being wrongly convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl.

This happened, he said, because policy makers at the city of Houston were deliberately indifferent to rampant under funding, under staffing and a lack of supervision at the crime lab that created a high risk an innocent person could be convicted or the guilty one could go free.

“We will prove that a false and misleading serology report violated (Rodriguez’s) constitutional right to a fair trial,” Scheck told jurors in U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore’s court.

A key piece of evidence in the criminal case was a pubic hair found in the girl’s underwear. A Houston police crime lab specialist testified falsely that the serology report on that hair eliminated another suspect, Isidro Yanez, but not Rodriguez. The case was tried before DNA evidence was used in court. DNA tests done 17 years later showed the hair belonged to Yanez.

Brown, Holmes blamed

Scheck said evidence will show the lab specialist had a pattern of changing findings to match what the police and prosecutors wanted.

One of the policy makers Scheck blames is Lee P. Brown, the former Houston mayor who was police chief in 1987 when Rodriguez was convicted. Brown is scheduled to testify in the case, as is former Harris District Attorney John B. Holmes Jr., who was top prosecutor at the time of the trial.

Rodriguez originally sued Harris County and others but dismissed all parties except for the city of Houston, who his lawyers say is most clearly culpable.

But Robert Cambrice, a lawyer for the city, told jurors that it was bad lawyering by the prosecutor and Rodriguez’s late defense attorney that led to the false conviction, not an unquestioned lie by a city employee. He said there was no city policy that led to the error in this case and under funding didn’t cause the employee to lie.

“No city policy makers approved of unconstitutional fabrication of evidence,” Cambrice said.

Cambrice asked the jury not to be overcome by the emotion surrounding Rodriguez’s ordeal.

The trail is likely to last two weeks. The five-woman, three-man jury heard from an assistant police chief late Tuesday about how the city didn’t closely investigate crime lab problems until after a 2002 local television report. That finally led to a $5 million independent investigation that highlighted Rodriguez’s case and others, she said.

It wasn’t until 2004 that a local court ruled Rodriguez should be freed because of the inaccurate trial testimony. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later vacated Rodriguez’s conviction. He has never received an official pardon and thus has received no compensation from the state.

mary.flood@chron.com