Jury Takes 5 Minutes to Acquit Tony Wright After Retrial Held Despite DNA Evidence Proving His Innocence

Here’s a pretty incredible story out of Philadelphia:

Last week, after 25 years in prison for rape, robbery and murder, Tony Wright was found not guilty in a two-and-a-half-week re-trial – a verdict that took a jury of his peers just five minutes to deliberate. “The evidence of his innocence was so overwhelming that there could’ve been no other verdict,” said Grace Greco, the jury forewoman, at a packed and emotional press conference in the Philadelphia offices of Wright’s star-studded legal team. “I’m angry that this case was ever re-tried, but thrilled that we were able to release Tony from this nightmare of twenty-five years.”

Wright, however, very nearly never had a chance to prove his innocence.

In the case, DNA evidence showed that Wright “hadn’t raped an elderly widow named Louise Talley, and that another man – a violent crack addict named Ronnie Byrd – had.” That DNA evidence

should have been enough to free Wright immediately, with an apology and a sizable check from the city to compensate him for his suffering. Instead, Seth Williams, Philadelphia’s reviled District Attorney, chose to re-present murder charges and hold him in a cell for two more years. “I’ve been doing this, with my partner Barry Scheck, for 25 years, and never once in our history have we had to try a case after our client was exonerated.”

This wasn’t the first obstacle put in Wright’s way. Wright initially confessed to the crimes at issue before he claimed that this was a false confession and that DNA testing would prove his innocence. In a 2007 opinion, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, finding that a confession per se precluded such testing. In 2011, however, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, disagreed, joining

42 other states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government [which] have enacted statutes providing for post conviction DNA testing, and none of those statutes expressly bars DNA testing in cases where there is a confession—even if it has been ruled voluntary. 

That testing, of course, led to Byrd. 

The article on the case also notes that.

At his initial trial, in 1993, [Wright] was minimally defended by a court-appointed lawyer who was paid $1,800 to take his case. Though Wright’s life hung in the balance, that lawyer, Bernie Siegel, never tracked down alibi witnesses or rebutted the cops’ story that Wright had freely confessed just minutes after they’d brought him in.

-CM