Dallas man being cleared by DNA review that he didnt request

In 1990, Michael Phillips was convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl at a motel in Dallas, where they both lived. Phillips pleaded guilty because, he said later, his attorney told him that as a black man who had been accused of raping a white teenager, he should try to avoid a jury trial. He went to prison for a dozen years and, after his release, spent another six months in jail after failing to register as a sex offender.

Now, nearly a quarter of a century after he was convicted, Phillipss name is being cleared. And, in an unusual twist, he didnt even realize it was happening.

Hundreds of people have been exonerated through DNA testing, with 317 such post-conviction exonerations since 1989, according to the Innocence Project. Last week, the office of Craig Watkins, the Dallas County district attorney, announced that Phillips, 57, was going to join their ranks.

Phillips, though, was not aware that DNA testing was going to prove his innocence, nor was he seeking such tests or pushing for an exoneration. He is the first person exonerated by a prosecutors office without doing these things, according to Watkinss office and the National Registry of Exonerations.

This is different from other exonerationsin a very important way, said Samuel R. Gross, editor of the National Registry of Exonerations and a law professor at the University of Michigan. The man who was exonerated, this wasnt on his mind. He wasnt thinking about it, he hadnt thought about it.

Instead, the first he heard about it was when someone from the Conviction Integrity Unit contacted him, Gross said. That unit was established by Watkinss office in 2007 to review and investigate claims of innocence and other old cases. (Gross worked with the conviction integrity group and suggested the project that eventually resulted in Phillipss exoneration.)

As part of the ongoing effort to review untested rape kits without waiting for the convicted people to request such reviews evidence from the 1990 rape was run through the FBIs Combined DNA Index System, which identified a different person as the actual rapist, Watkins said in a statement.

The woman who was raped partially pulled up the ski mask on her attacker, and she said she recognized Phillips. She also picked a photo of him out of a lineup. But after an investigation, Watkinss office determined that the other man was the rapist.

DNA tells the truth, so this was another case of eyewitness misidentification where one individuals life was wrongfully snatched and a violent criminal was allowed to go free, Watkins said in the statement. We apologize to Michael Phillips for a criminal justice system that failed him.

Meanwhile, Phillips had gotten out of prison in 2002, only to return to jail in 2004 for failing to register as a sex offender. (At the time, he mentioned DNA testing in petitions that were denied.)

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Dallas man being cleared by DNA review that he didnt request