Craig Watkins, RIP

Texas' first black district attorney showed the country that voters could embrace a fairer, more just approach to prosecuting crimes

Craig Watkins, by Michael Paulsen for the Houston Chronicle

I missed it at the time, but former Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins died last month. He was 56.

Watkins, who had previously been a criminal defense attorney, was the first black District Attorney in Texas history. He was also the first in the wave of progressive, reform-oriented prosecutors to take office over the last 15 years. His 2006 win came just after a string of exonerations in Dallas by the Texas Innocence Project, and a series of scandals in which Texas prosecutors were shown to have hidden exculpatory evidence.

Watkins was the first DA in the country to set up a conviction integrity unit (CIU), an office whose sole responsibility is to seek out and rectify wrongful convictions. Thanks to the CIU, within a few years Dallas County had more exonerations than all but a couple states. In the end, Watkins’s office exonerated 35 people.

There are a few reasons why the unit had so much success. The first is that for years the county had continued to reelect the aggressive, hard-charging prosecutor Henry Wade, who’s probably most known as the man who prosecuted Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade, and as the DA who wrongly prosecuted Randal Dale Adams in the Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview I did with Watkins for Reason magazine in 2008.

reason: What are some common stakes you're seeing repeated in these innocence cases? Do they tend to be willful mistakes, or more due to negligence?

Watkins: It's a combination of things. Negligence, prosecutorial misconduct, faulty witness identification. It's just been a mindset of "conviction at all costs" around here. So we changed that philosophy. We aren't here to rack up convictions. We're here to seek justice. Once we can get over that win at all costs mentality, I think we'll see fewer and fewer of these wrongful convictions.

reason: You talk about the mindset of winning convictions at all costs. The legendary law-and-order Dallas prosecutor Henry Wade, who held the job you now hold for many, many years, embodied that philosophy. He's known to have actually boasted about convicting innocent people—that convincing a jury to put an innocent man in jail proved his prowess as a prosecutor.

Watkins: Oh yeah, it was a badge of honor at the time—to knowingly convict someone that wasn't guilty. It's widely known among defense attorneys and prosecutors from that era. We had to come in clean out all the remnants of that older way of thinking.

The second reason Watkins’s CIU was so successful is that, beginning in the 1980s, Dallas County had sent biological evidence to a private lab for testing. That lab had a policy of preserving all of the evidence from the cases it tested, and did a good job of preserving that evidence. DNA testing is the one category of evidence that tends to persuade the courts to reopen cases, and there was lots of evidence for Watkins’ CIU to test.

But this wasn’t common at the time. When decades-old crime lab incompetence or corruption has been discovered in other jurisdictions, subsequent efforts to look for possible wrongful convictions have been hampered by evidence degraded to the point that it’s untestable. Some crime labs dispose of evidence after a given number of years, or after a prisoner has exhausted his appeals.

The final reason Dallas uncovered so many wrongful convictions is a pretty simple one: Watkins himself. Voters in Dallas County had simply elected a DA who was willing to look.

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When Watkins first began uncovering these cases, there was some discussion about how applicable what he was finding was to the rest of the country. But there’s really no reason to think the county is unique. Of the three reasons Watkins found so many wrongful convictions, two had nothing to do with the way the city prosecuted crimes. All else being equal, there’s no reason to think that if other cities had properly preserved evidence and then elected a prosecutor willing to look for exonerations, they wouldn’t have found wrongful convictions at about the same rate as Dallas.

The only factor somewhat specific to Dallas was the long tenure of Wade. But Wade was hardly unique. If we could quantify and plot the aggressiveness of prosecutors from the 1970s through the early 2000s on a spectrum, I think it’s safe to say that the vast, vast majority of them would be a lot closer to Wade than to Watkins.

The publicity and glowing media coverage Watkins received spurred other DAs to set up similar units around the country. There are around 50 such units today. But it’s been a mixed bag. Offices that take wrongful convictions seriously have seen lots of overturned convictions. In Philadelphia, for example, Larry Krasner’s office has exonerated 35 people since 2018, and persuaded judges to commute sentences in dozens more.

But in other jurisdictions, the CIU has been more of a way for a DA to project fairness and justice without actually living up to it. Many go years without exonerating anyone. Some DAs don’t permit their CIU to investigate any cases that are still being litigated — an absurd restriction that could keep innocent people in prison for years, and that seems downright preposterous in death penalty jurisdictions, where most cases are in litigation right up to the time of execution.

In still other jurisdictions, well-intentioned CIUs have found some success, but have fought pushback from law enforcement leaders who don’t want bad police work exposed, or from city and county officials who worry about expensive lawsuits from the wrongly convicted.

And of course, as I’ve already covered here at The Watch, since the pandemic-era spike in some types of crime, come CIUs are under attack by Republican politicians who seem to think that wanting to free innocent people from prison is “soft on crime.”

Still, it’s unquestionably a net good that there are now dozens of CIUs around the country. Their very existence is an admission that the system often gets it wrong. Watkins is a big reason for that.

Perhaps the most important thing about Watkins’s tenure is that he was reelected. It’s impressive enough to get elected DA in Texas as a black defense attorney, and to then implement real, substantive change. But to get elected, institute change, and — in the face of the sort of attacks on progressive prosecutors that have now become all too familiar — still convince voters to elect you again, is a hell of an achievement.

By the time Watkins ran for a third term in 2014, he taken on some baggage. A portion of that baggage was political. A few of his top deputy prosecutors had recently run against incumbent Democratic judges, and another ran against the party chair in the county. Some saw all of that as a coordinated power grab, and it turned much of his own party against him.

But for all the good Watkins did, voters were also likely reacting to some indefensible ethical lapses. In 2013, Watkins rear-ended a pickup truck while driving an SUV his office had obtained through asset forfeiture. That’s bad enough. Watkins then used another $60,000 in forfeiture money to settle with the driver of the truck, then asked the driver to sign a confidentiality agreement. A subseqeuent series of audits revealed other misuse of forfeiture funds by Watkins, as well as missing documentation on yet more funds.

Texas has some of the vaguest, most law enforcement-friendly forfeiture laws in the country. Watkins was hardly the only public official found to have abused the system, and he was never charged with a crime. But that doesn’t excuse his behavior, and it’s an unfortunate mark on his legacy.

Despite the baggage, Watkins lost his last election by less than one percent, which would seem to suggest that while voters were turned off by Watkins’s scandals, many had bought into the fairer, more conscientious approach he brought to the DA’s office. The county returned to a reformist prosecutor four years later, in 2018. And despite being targeted by national Republicans, that reformist incumbent was reelected by 20 points in 2022.

Watkins’s election and reelection showed that after decades of mass incarceration and the hang ‘em high philosophy that had dominated DA’s offices really since their inception — a different sort of prosecutor was possible.

Shortly after Watkins died, Richard Miles, a wrongly convicted man Watkins’s office freed after 15 years in prison, summed up his legacy to a CBS affiliate. “He changed the trajectory of justice,” Miles said. “D.A. Watkins really represented hope. That's what he did."

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