Blind Eyewitness Testimony Resulted in 12-Years of Wrongful Prison Time
Darien Harris is a free man now yet life is still wrongfully difficult. Eyewitness lying and legal misconduct prospered. People chose to believe the lie.
Imagine if you will, a person being convicted of murder, one that they didn’t commit, based in part on testimony, presented as strong and credible evidence, from a witness who was later determined to be legally blind.
That’s a quite interesting fictional book or movie. Except that it factually happened.
Darien Harris was found responsible and guilty in 2014 “in connection with a fatal shooting at a Chicago South Side gas station in 2011,” reported the Associated Press.
Harris was sentenced to 76 years in prison for the death of Rondell Moore and ended up being incarcerated, per the AP, for 12 years. Harris was freed in December, 2023 due to the work of The Exoneration Project, which was able to reveal and prove that eyewitness Dextor Saffold’s eyesight was severely compromised.
Saffold was discovered to have advanced glaucoma. That’s not all. He lied about his eyesight quality and deficiencies.
Harris was 30 years old when the courts and authorities finally released him. He was understandably hurt and upset. Harris and his legal team have decided to seek financial acknowledgement of what happened to him and make some level of amends for it. They filed a federal civil rights lawsuit that alleged police fabricated evidence and coerced witnesses into making false statements, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Those are extremely serious allegations.
Harris was in his senior year of high school, 18-years-old, when he was arrested.
“The legally blind eyewitness picked Harris out of a police lineup and identified him in court,” the AP reported. “The eyewitness testified that he was riding his motorized scooter near the gas station when he heard gunshots and saw a person aiming a handgun. He also added that the shooter bumped into him.”
In the trial, Harris’ attorney asked Saffold if his known diabetes affected his vision. “He said yes but denied he had vision problems,” according to the AP.
“But the man’s doctor (Robert G. Taub) deemed him legally blind nine years before the incident, court records show,” the AP wrote. In addition, “A gas station attendant testified that Harris wasn’t the shooter.”
Harris of course tried to defend himself but no one wanted to listen and believe.
'I was trying to tell the people all this time he's lying. He's lying,' Harris said of Saffold. 'Here's what came about. He was really lying.”
Harris talks about what life is like now, even as a free person and maybe, especially as a man who was in prison — and a Black one.
“I don’t have any financial help. I’m still (treated like) a felon, so I can’t get a good job. It’s hard for me to get into school,” Harris detailed. “I’ve been so lost. … I feel like they took a piece of me that is hard for me to get back.”
His attorney crystalized the shame of it all.
“Justice is supposed to be blind,” Lauren Myerscough-Mueller said. “The eyewitness is not supposed to be blind.”
The courts and legal system, regardless of how much it’s parroted that it is the best in the world, too often operates recklessly, unethically and let’s be sharply honest, in a corrupt manner.
There are rarely professional-and-personal painful consequences for the bad actors and actresses within that “machine,” and especially punishments that even remotely compare to what the people that are victimized endure.
The counter-argument might be “hindsight is 20/20” but that is deflection and dismissiveness. It is a lack of humility and accountability.
What Darien Harris had no choice to face, what is family and friends had no choice to face, was both un-American and absolutely American, based on the nation’s history.
Harris will likely win his lawsuit, as he should, which will help mitigate his challenges. The trauma and pain however will always be with him to some level. How could it not?
His reputation and that of his family were dragged through the mud by the very power — the law — that brags on itself and is entrusted to protect us from crime, even the appalling behavior of itself.
Harris is being doubted, even though he did not kill another person, because he lived in prison for over a decade. The reality he is facing is in other people’s bias, he must be dangerous and unworthy of trust and all the benefits that come with it.
He is owed much more than his freedom. He won’t receive the due moral balance of full confessions of wrongdoing, remorse, apologies from the courts and all the people involved in robbery of all those years of his life, freedom and potential in different areas of his life. His family won’t receive any of that either for all they lost with their son.
The money, of course, will come from the lawsuit and it likely will be significant. That won’t make “right” of course or by itself, heal the emotional, psychological trauma or the effects of those realities on the physical body.
Harris’ reputation has been improved by the court’s decision to release him from prison. The media’s reporting of the story and it populating online is additionally helping improve Harris’ opinion.
The police and courts assaulted and abused Harris’ reputation. That is a moral crime.
He will still encounter doubters, illogical as that sounds. Yet he is strong, resilient and the future is now, finally, again full of possibility. Not all wrongfully-convicted people however get Darien Harris’ breakthrough, freedom and a chance at the life they should have long had but were forcefully, arrogantly denied.
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Michael Toebe is a reputation consultant, advisor and communications specialist at Reputation Intelligence: Reputation Quality, assisting individuals and organizations with further building reputation as an asset or ethically and responsibly protecting, restoring or reconstructing it.
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