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Attorney Mike Ware (left center) and exoneree Richard Miles (right center) were joined by the WIP board at the conclusion of the luncheon on
Sept. 24, 2012. — Photo by Dan Brothers
Richard Miles shares prison ordeal
He was only 19 years old when he was arrested in 1994. Despite
little evidence, he was found guilty and sentenced to 60 years
behind bars. Richard Miles then spent nearly 15 years in prison
for a murder and an attempted murder that he did not commit.
The Bernie Schuchmann Conference Center at Texas Wesleyan
School of Law was packed to capacity by faculty, students, staff
and guests on Sept. 24, 2012, wanting to hear Miles’ story,
during the Wesleyan Innocence Project Exoneree Luncheon.
“It is an honor and a pleasure to have been given the task of
introducing Mr. Miles,” Mike Ware, WIP supervising attorney,
said in his opening remarks. “He is an extraordinary human
being.” Ware first heard about the case from Miles’ attorney,
Cheryl Wattley, who was working with Centurion Ministries,
an organization that investigates actual innocence cases, in
Princeton, N.J.
“Centurion had taken the Miles case,” Ware said, “and believed
very, very strongly in it.” The case was presented to Ware, who
at the time was head of the Conviction Integrity Unit in the Dallas
County district attorney’s office. Reflecting, Ware noted that, “It
sounded like a case that maybe did have some merit and did
deserve further investigation.
“Every time we went out and talked to a witness, every time we
investigated further – the stronger the case for Richard Miles’
innocence seemed to be,” Ware observed. “The Texas Court of
Criminal Appeals this year [2012] officially exonerated Richard
Miles in a fascinating, 52-page published opinion.”
“To be in the arena of the judicial system, you must have
compassion,” Miles said as he began to share his ordeal with
the conference center audience. In 1994, Miles was arrested
by Dallas police for a fatal shooting at a Texaco station near
Bachman Lake. He was detained in homicide while the police
investigated his alibi. A short time later, a detective returned and
said, “Your story checked out, but you’re going to prison. They
have a witness.”
Miles spent the next 17 months in the county jail until his jury trial
in August 1995. He was then 20 years old. Despite none of Miles’
fingerprints being found at the scene, no weapon being found,
and nine people saying that he was not the shooter – Miles was
convicted and sentenced to 40 years for murder and 20 years for
attempted murder. “Everything became black,” Miles recalled.
“Freedom – people just don’t grasp the concept of freedom,”
he said, as a free man talking to a crowd of law students in Fort
Worth, while reflecting on his years of incarceration. “We take
the small things in life for granted every day. The thing that was
taken away from me and the thing that God gave everyone – and
that is freedom.
“My case was the first case ever where a person was actually
exonerated where there was no DNA, nor confession, nor a
recantation,” Miles said. “Way before I went to jury trial, someone
had already called the police and told them that ‘my boyfriend
has been bragging about killing two people last year at Bachman
Lake and he showed me the 9mm gun.’” The caller went into
great detail about the crime, divulging information that could
have only come from someone who had been at the scene, as
there had been no publicity about the murder.
The police notes about that call had been withheld from both the
defense and prosecution. “Nobody knows who dropped the ball,”
Miles recalled. “The evidence was the key that eventually began
to unlock the doors.”
When he was released from prison in October 2009, Miles had
not been exonerated. “It was hard,” he said. “It was really, really
hard because people looked at me as if I was guilty.”
On Feb. 15, 2012, Richard Miles was officially exonerated.
“You never know the weight that you can push up off you, until it’s
put on you,” Miles concluded, reflecting on his nearly 15 years
in prison.
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