DALLAS — For nearly 26 years, Johnnie Lindsey was in prison, a wrongly convicted man waiting for someone on the outside to believe in his innocence.
Last year, a DNA test from a rape kit proved Lindsey innocent, and he was released.
The 56-year-old man's sweetly subdued reaction upon hearing he will be freed is the dramatic high point in the opening episode of the six-part documentary series "Dallas DNA," premiering Tuesday at 10 p.m. EDT on Investigation Discovery. Relief floods across Lindsey's smooth face, his pursed lips showing the barest hint of a smile.
"On the inside, it was the feeling of experiencing a dream come true," Lindsey said in a recent interview with The Associated Press,
Lindsey's case is one of several profiled in "Dallas DNA," a series chronicling trailblazing Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins and his team's efforts to use DNA evidence to clear the innocent and confirm the convictions of the guilty.
A 2001 Texas law allowed inmates to request post-conviction DNA testing. But Dallas prosecutors routinely denied those requests until Watkins, the state's first black district attorney, took office in 2007.
Watkins took a different tack, throwing open his office's files and allowing the Innocence Project of Texas to review cases where DNA testing could prove someone was wrongly convicted.
The results have been astounding. Dallas County's 20 DNA exonerations are the most of any county in the nation and more than all but two states, according to The Innocence Project, a New York-based legal center. (In one of the 20 cases, however, the DA's office believes the exonerated man is guilty of a related crime and will retry him.)
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6394490.html