Two men incarcerated for the last 12 years for a Dallas murder will walk free today thanks to the work of UT-Austin and UT-Arlington students.
The 10:30 a.m. hearing today in district court in Dallas will exonerate Claude Alvin Simmons Jr. and Christopher Shun Scott, sentenced to life in prison for the 1997 murder of Alfonso Aguilar. Two other men have been taken into custody for the case, one of whom gave a detailed confession — first to UT students, and later to Dallas police during a polygraph test in August.
The exonerations are the first made in a Dallas capital murder case not based on DNA evidence and the first achieved by the UT Austin Actual Innocence Clinic, started in 2003, and the UT Arlington Innocence Network, started in 2005. The release of the two men this afternoon follows a string of 20 exonerations in Dallas based on DNA evidence.
The student groups began working on the case three and a half years ago, and their efforts came to a head in the last two months with the confession of Alonzo Hardy, a suspect in the original trial. Hardy’s confession also implicated Don Michael Anderson, who was arrested Tuesday night in Houston.
Hardy has been incarcerated in state prison in Lovelady, Texas for an unrelated aggravated robbery conviction since 1999.
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins said the student investigation was vital to the exonerations.
“We wouldn’t have known about the case but for UTA,” Watkins said.
Collaboration between the two separate UT projects began in June when they met with the district attorney’s office and began assisting them in their own investigative work. Dana Scott, a law school alumna who worked on the case last fall, said the main focus of the investigation was an interview with Hardy. Scott said she didn’t expect Hardy to come clean so quickly when she and other students spoke to him in prison last August.
“When you go to interview someone, you never expect that they’re going to completely confess to it and completely exonerate two other men,” Scott said.
Attorney John Stickels, director of the undergraduate innocence program at UT Arlington, said the collaboration between the students, Dallas police and the Dallas County district attorney was vital to the success of the project.
“This case right here is a perfect example of what can happen when you have a bunch of people who get together and just try to do the right thing,” Stickels said.
Dallas County public defender Michelle Moore said a Dallas Police Department polygraph test of Hardy two months ago convinced them the wrong men were behind bars. The Dallas police then began retracing the steps of the students’ investigation with cooperation from the district attorney’s office.
“That’s the point when this became an active murder investigation,” Moore said.
UT law school staff attorney and clinical instructor Tiffany Dowling oversaw the UT-Austin students’ work on the project. Five to six UT Law students had worked on Simmons’s and Scott’s case since the beginning.
She said she, like others involved in the exoneration effort, will be glad to see the two men reunited with their families after a 12-year separation.
“Times like these are what this program is set up to do,” Dowling said. “I would anticipate that once our name is associated with an exoneration, there will be more requests for assistance."
Warder also was ruled to have withheld beneficial evidence to the defense in a rape-murder trial when she was a prosecutor. A judge last year ruled that the defendant in that case - Clay Chabot - should get new trial because of Warder's violation of the law. The FOUR separate felony jury trial, life-sentence cases that Warder has now been associated with as withholding evidence (as a prosecutor and later as a judge) are:
Chris Scott
Claude Simmons
Clay Chabot
Gerald Pabst
Please investigate why she still has a law license.
Complaints may be made to the State Bar of Texas,
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Austin, Texas 78711
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