60 Minutes on the Justice -- and Injustices -- of Dallas County
For those who missed last night's 60 Minutes -- about how Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins and the Innocence Project are taking on "the Wade legacy," in the words of Scott Pelley -- the entire 12-minute segment is after the jump. Among the reasons the story is especially extraordinary: CBS News' cameras were with James Lee Woodard last year as he provided the DNA sample that finally exonerated him after 27 years of being imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. Pelley also gathers five other men exonerated by DNA evidence with the assistance of the Innocence Project, among them Billy James Smith, who "lost ten family members while I was incarcerated" for a sexual assault he didn't commit.
Says Craig Watkins, when Pelley asks him whether he's wasting time fixing Henry Wade's wrongs, "When justice has failed, we have to fix it." And that's precisely what you see happen at around the 8:20 mark, when Woodard is told, one week ago today, he's soon to be a free man. Said District Judge Mark Stoltz -- a former Dallas County prosecutor -- it wasn't justice, "but the end of injustice." --Robert Wilonsky
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