Amicus Brief: Areli Escobar 2022
Areli Escobar v. The State of Texas
Filing Date
July 26, 2022
Charge
Capital Murder
Jurisdiction
Supreme Court of the United States
Partners
Innocence Network
Summary
CIFS and the Innocence Network filed this brief in the Supreme Court of the United States in Areli Escobar’s case to educate the court on the unreliable DNA testing that led to his death sentence. Noting that after removing the DNA evidence presented at trial, the remaining evidence relied on by the State was questionable and circumstantial, including varying witness accounts, shoeprint comparison evidence, and latent print evidence.
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
Petitioner Areli Escobar was convicted and ultimately sentenced to death based on DNA testing that was later shown by the defendant, and conceded by the prosecution, to be unreliable. In- deed, the purported DNA evidence was so flawed that the municipal forensics lab that collected, analyzed, and provided the crucial testimony on the DNA was shuttered for violations of professional standards so egregious and intractable that it could not be safely reopened. And that pattern of misconduct was on full display in Mr. Escobar’s case. The DNA evidence was exposed to severe contamination risks at the lab, and the analysts assigned to this case repeatedly ignored best practices and engaged in bias-driven manipulation of the testing to incriminate Mr. Escobar. The prosecution broadcast this false testing as the centerpiece of its case, and one juror even stated publicly that the DNA evidence took him off the fence and convinced him to join a guilty verdict.
The already significant risk that Mr. Escobar waswrongfully convicted becomes enormous when one considers that the other forensic evidence introduced against him was also unreliable. The shoe-print analysis offered by the prosecution was unscientific and showed nothing more than that a tread pattern on the crime scene resembled a pattern found on thousands of other shoes in the area, including one of Mr. Escobar’s. The supposed fingerprint “match” to Mr. Escobar was the result of biased mid-trial retesting, involved a low-quality latent print, and could not scientifically be described as a “match” in any event. And the remaining evidence did not remotely support a guilty verdict.
The Texas habeas court recognized all this and correctly recommended habeas relief. Remarkably, the State agreed with that recommendation and urged the CCA to issue the writ. The CCA’s refusal to grant relief on these facts—or even to acknowledge the State’s admission of error, despite the State’s own request for reconsideration—is an obvious violation of this Court’s precedents, and is manifestly unjust. This Court should therefore summarily reverse or set the case for argument.