more than 150 inmates whose convictions may be based on faulty Houston...

more than 150 inmates whose convictions may be based on faulty Houston crime lab evidence have asked that their cases be reviewed, a judge said.
Since Oct. 22, Judge Mary Bacon, a retired state district judge overseeing the review of 180 convictions with flawed blood-typing evidence, has conducted hearings with all inmates currently incarcerated in those cases. Of 160 inmates contacted at various Texas prisons via video conferences, all but 4 agreed to have their cases reviewed.
The hearings are the 1st step in a plan that Harris County's 22 criminal state district judges developed last month to review cases with problematic blood-typing evidence from the Houston Police Department's crime lab.
A team will review the 156 cases to determine how essential HPD's analyses were to securing the convictions, according to attorney Bob Wicoff. Wicoff will be joined by two other lawyers, who should be named next week, and volunteers including other lawyers, students and academics.
Wicoff represented Josiah Sutton, the first man exonerated in the HPD crime lab scandal.
The team will contact defendants they have not yet reached.
The review of these 180 serology cases is the latest in a string of reviews of work from the HPD crime lab, which has been under scrutiny since 2002 when news reports and an audit exposed errors in the crime lab's DNA analyses.