Open & Shut Case for Black Defendants with white victims: Black man Wrongly Convicted of Raping White teen exonerated by DNA

From [HERE] A Black man wrongly convicted of raping a white teen in 1990 will be awarded $80,000 for every year he served in prison. Michael Phillips, who suffers from sickle cell anemia and is confined to a wheelchair, thought he’d die with the injustice of being labeled a sex offender.

“I never imagined I would live to see my name cleared,” Phillips said in a statement. “Six of my siblings died from the same disease, so I thank God for sustaining me in prison.” Dallas police arrested Phillips 24 years ago after a 16-year-old white girl identified him as the man who beat and raped her in a hotel.

The girl claimed her attacker wore a black and white ski mask, but she bit his hand and was able to pull off the mask. She instantly recognized Phillips, who worked as a maintenance man and lived at the hotel, she told investigators. She later picked him out of a lineup, cementing his fate.

Phillips, a black man with a previous burglary conviction, agreed to a plea deal rather than challenge the word of the white victim in court and risk an even longer sentence. He served 12 years in prison, but the nightmare continued after his release in 2002. He failed to register as a sex offender in 2004 and was ordered to spend another six months behind bars.

Phillips had given up hope of ever being cleared, but a special unit in the Dallas District Attorney’s office began reviewing previously untested rape kits from 1990 and discovered the life-changing truth.

The semen sample collected from the crime scene matched another man, Lee Marvin Banks, who had lived at the hotel at the time of the attack.

“It is a great day for Mr. Phillips, but a horrible day for the justice system,” Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins said in a statement.

A DNA profile of Banks was added to an FBI database after he was incarcerated for violating his probation on a 2012 burglary conviction. Investigators now believe he was the real rapist.

“DNA tells the truth, so this was another case of eyewitness misidentification where one individual’s life was wrongfully snatched and a violent criminal was allowed to go free,” Watkins said. “We apologize to Michael Phillips for a criminal justice system that failed him.” [MORE]