By Elena Watts

Actual Innocence Clinic

Twelve years. First graders become high school seniors in 12 years. As few as two, and as many as three, U.S. presidents serve in 12 years. The two World Wars together lasted fewer than 12 years. Lives are made and lost in 12 years.

Two lives lost for 12 years belong to Claude Simmons, 54 years old, and Christopher Scott, 39 years old, who were convicted of a crime they did not commit and imprisoned from 1997 to 2009. The work of UT-Austin’s Actual Innocence Clinic, UT-Arlington’s Innocence Network and the Dallas County District Attorney’s office proved the wrongful conviction of Simmons and Scott in the robbery and murder of Alfonso Aguilar. They were exonerated Oct. 23, 2009.

Between midnight and 1 a.m. on April 7, 1997, Simmons and Scott were victimized by a system put in place to protect them. Returning from a friend’s house, they pulled into Simmons’ driveway and stepped from the car in time to have a spotlight attached to a slowly passing police car scan them.

“The man killed—it happened in my neighborhood,” Simmons said. “About 10 or 15 minutes later, that’s when the police were at my door. They said we fit the description of the guys who had committed the crime around the corner.”

Tiffany Dowling, clinical instructor for UT’s Actual Innocence Clinic who worked on this case for three years, said the officers that initially arrived at the scene of the homicide put a very general description of the assailants out that was essentially: two black males, one of them is tall and thin and one of them is short and heavy.

“The officer sees them [Simmons and Scott] and feels that they fit the description and that’s how they got pulled into it,” Dowling said. “They were two black males in a car in the vicinity.”

In February 2008, Natalie Ellis, a junior criminal justice major at the University of Texas-Arlington, began working on the case through UTA’s Innocence Network advised by John Stickels, professor of criminology and criminal jurisprudence.

Ellis said that Aguilar’s wife, the only eyewitness, named each of the men as the shooter at their respective trials despite the fact that her husband suffered only one gunshot wound.

“In my opinion, the biggest contributor to what went wrong was the judge [Janice Warder],” Ellis said.

Since the judge presided over both trials, Ellis thought she should have noticed something was wrong when the witness testified at Scott’s trial that Scott shot her husband, and then named Simmons as the shooter at Simmons’ trial the next week.

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The night of the arrest, Scott said the police took him to a building, handcuffed him and sat him down.

“This police officer walked a lady up, pointed at me and said I was the one that committed the crime against her husband and she agreed to it,” Scott said. “And they put me in a line-up five minutes later and she [Aguilar’s wife] couldn’t pick me out of a line-up.”

An interrogation ensued during which Scott said he claimed his innocence and asked for a lie detector test, which the police refused to administer. Adding to the disarray, Scott said Aguilar’s wife changed her statement several times.

“So when forensics came back and I didn’t fire the pistol—they took my clothes and did a forensic report on my hand the same night and it came up negative—they saw that I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger,” Scott said. “First she [Aguilar’s wife] said I had the gun, then she said I didn’t have the gun, then she said we [Scott and Simmons] took times [sic] holding the gun, then the last statement was that I stood by the door, didn’t say nothing, and picked the money up off the floor and put it in my pocket.”

Eyewitness identification is generally considered top on the list of things commonly occurring in cases of wrongful conviction, Dowling said.  It was also a cross racial identification—she is Hispanic, the men are black—and Dowling said that can often be a problem.  “There’s a lot of social science research that plays out the idea that it is more difficult to identify someone of another race,” she said.

Simmons, who had faith that Aguilar’s wife would prove their innocence, said it did not hit him until they came back with the guilty verdict.

“The whole time that I was in jail I just knew, I thought once I go to court and this lady sees me, she would know right then that I’m not the guy that she thinks I am,” Simmons said. “But then when I went to court, she got up on the stand and said, ‘Yeah that’s the one over there that killed my husband,’ so I was really shocked and amazed that she said that because I couldn’t figure out why was this lady saying that I did this.”

Traditionally, as was done in this case, a six-pack line-up is used to make the identification.  The witness is given a piece of paper with six pictures on it and told to pick out the person that looks most like the person who committed the crime.

“And that’s bad because it tells the witness that the police think they have the person who did it and it’s on this paper, and so the witness is urged to pick someone out,” Stickels said.

There are also ways that the pictures can be placed on the line-up to lead the witness to make the identification that the police want made, he said.

“When picture line-ups are done that way, the investigator knows who the person is who they think committed the crime and the investigator from time to time, either unintentionally or intentionally, leads the witness in picking out who they want to pick out,” Stickels continued.

“The traditional way that officers do identifications just does not work and there are much better ways for officers to have eye witnesses make identifications that need to be implemented,” Stickels said. “In fact, the Dallas Police Department has recently implemented changes in the way identifications are made.”

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The Dallas police now use a sequential double blind line-up. Instead of having the pictures on a piece of paper where the witness can compare them to each other, Stickels said, they are done sequentially, and the person conducting the sequential identification does not know who the suspect is.

“And so that person cannot direct the witness either intentionally or unintentionally who to choose,” he said. “It’s a very good way of breaking identifications because the error rate goes down substantially. The officers sometimes don’t like it because the identification rate goes down, but the error rate goes down too.”

Ellis said it was difficult at first not to be upset with the police who she said got it wrong from the  beginning. “I honestly felt that the police knew, and they had rumors, and they had evidence, and they had another police officer testifying that the police department had the two wrong guys and he knew who the right guys were,” she said.

Ellis, who became attached to Simmons’ and Scott’s families through the process, said that Simmons’ sister encouraged her when she was stuck.

“Claude’s sister fortunately saved every document that she could get her hands on regarding her brother,” Ellis said. “The police report that I went down and got was only 12 pages and the actual police report was 40-something pages and through this whole process I ended up every day talking on the phone [to Claude’s sister].”

Ellis said that when her husband thought she had lost her mind because she was working so hard for so long and nothing was happening, Claude’s sister was the only person in her life who really understood what she was trying to do and could offer comfort.

According to the police report, a comment made by an officer read that he kept going to suspect Don Michael Anderson’s house and leaving a card, but Anderson would not call him back, and he was therefore taking him off the suspect list.

“Well if he would have followed up with that, just because you can’t get a hold of somebody and you believe they might really be the one who did it, just because they’re not calling you back and you can’t get them doesn’t mean you brush them off,” Ellis said.

There was also evidence that the jury did not hear.  Ellis said a police officer wrote a letter and testified that he knew who the real shooter was and it was not the men who were in custody. The judge excused the jury during his testimony.

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“For a long time in Dallas County I think the prosecutors and district attorney’s office had the attitude that the most important thing was to obtain a conviction and that’s what they did, they obtained a conviction,” Stickels said. “And thankfully the attitude in the district attorney’s office is changing because Craig Watkins has changed that attitude.  Now the prosecutors are remembering that it is their function, it is their job, to do justice and not just to convict.”

Dowling said that DNA exonerations could, in part, account for Dallas County’s higher than normal exoneration rate.

“Part of the reason they are able to get DNA exonerations in Dallas County is because there was a lab that kept evidence that could be tested, whereas in some other counties you are not able to find the evidence to do testing on DNA cases,” Dowling said. “I think that that is a big contributor and Craig Watkins in the conviction integrity unit is in a unique situation that you don’t see across the U.S. They do a lot of investigation on their cases and have really taken it upon themselves to look into some of these older cases.”

Simmons and Scott were serving life sentences until Alonzo Hardy, a neighbor that Simmons said he grew up with, came forward and provided an affidavit stating that they were not involved, and that he had been there and committed the offense with another man named Don Michael Anderson. Hardy was already in prison serving 30 years for an unrelated aggravated robbery conviction. Without Hardy’s statement, it would have been difficult to prove that Simmons and Scott were not involved because it was not a DNA case, there was no real forensic evidence to be looked at, Dowling said.

“He [Hardy] provided details about where he was standing, that he had been shot at, and that Anderson had shot the man who died,” Dowling said.

There was a lot of investigation that had to be done to make sure that what Hardy said was the truth. The independent investigations conducted by UT-Austin and UT-Arlington produced the same conclusions, which Dowling said worked out well.

“So when we both went together to talk to the DA’s office, you had two different innocence organizations that had reviewed this case and came to the same conclusion,” Dowling said. “The DA’s office did their own investigation and came to the same conclusion. So you have lots of people with lots of different experiences looking at all the information and coming to the same conclusion.”

Stickels called freeing two innocent men the highlight of his career, while Ellis said it has not hit her yet.

“I’m with them once or twice a week, I take them around and try to help them get their lives in order. It’s still unreal to me,” Ellis said. “When I think that now they can just call whenever they want, and now I can go get them and we can go somewhere, it’s still surreal. For so long I thought ’I can’t wait for this day to happen, I can’t imagine what that’s going to be like‘ and now that it’s here it’s shocking.”

Ellis consults Simmons and Scott, whom she said have been amazingly positive through this entire experience.  She described them as eager to talk about cases and give their viewpoints.

“They are so into wanting to help other people, and carry this whole thing forward,” she said. “I totally see them from this moment on paying it forward.”

Dowling said it made her happy for Simmons and Scott to go home to their families, and that it rejuvenated her to get back into the swing of things and start working on other cases.

Simmons, pointing to one positive outcome of his experience, said, “A lot of other guys locked up who are innocent, it [their release] gives them hope, it lets them know somebody cares, and that if they just hold on and do the right thing, and take care of themselves, that one day their day will come.”

Scott echoed Simmons feelings: “There are a bunch more people in the position I was in and we need to help them out … so I pray to God that someone opens up their ears and eyes and hearts and helps them out.”

“I just want to thank UT-Austin, UT-Arlington, Natalie, Tiffany Dowling, and all who came together for this cause,” Simmons said. “I just want them to know that I’m thankful to God for them because it is truly a blessing that he brought all of us together and I’m just thankful.”