Shortly before midnight on December 10, 2010 (a Friday night), patrons of Club Blur (a bar in the Montrose district of Houston, Texas) watched in horror as a young man was beaten and stabbed to death in the parking lot. None of the witnesses knew the victim or the perpetrator, nor were they privy to the events that led up to the brutal murder. The Houston Police were called and, throughout the night and the next day, eyewitnesses provided video-recorded statements to investigators. Accounts from eyewitnesses varied in some ways, but were consistent in other respects. The victim had run into the parking lot and up the steps leading to the front door of the bar. He begged to be permitted to enter and to be protected from someone who was trying to kill him. The victim was a Caucasian male in his 20s. Bar employees failed to understand the seriousness of the situation and refused to let him inside the club for sanctuary. The perpetrator appeared moments later. He was an African-American male described as being 6’0”-6’6” tall, weighing approximately 200-260 lbs, in his late 20’s or early 30’s, and in athletic condition. He was well-dressed and wearing an orange shirt. The perpetrator and the victim scuffled in the parking lot; at one point during the struggle, the victim broke loose, but was ultimately caught and murdered. The perpetrator walked away into the night.

The following evening -- Saturday, December 11, 2010 -- Lydell Grant was parking his car in the parking lot shared by Club Blur and adjacent establishments as he prepared to meet friends at a neighboring bar. One of the employees of Club Blur who had witnessed the murder the night before saw him and believed he looked similar to the perpetrator. Indeed, Lydell Grant was an African-American male who otherwise fit within the broad and general descriptions provided by eyewitnesses. The bar employee wrote down the vehicle identification number (VIN) of Mr. Grant’s car, called Crime Stoppers to report the sighting, and eventually collected a cash reward for the information.

Based on the Crime Stoppers tip, Houston Police investigators assembled a photo lineup of six African-American males, including a photo of Mr. Grant. Over the next day and a half, all six eyewitnesses selected Mr. Grant’s photo as that of the perpetrator. The lead detective was allowed to administer the identification process in a non-double blind manner. In other words, he was aware of which photo was the “suspect” as he displayed the spread and observed each eyewitness as they were deciding on a choice. This approach permitted the detective to influence and/or cue the witness during deliberation and to reinforce their decision when they chose the suspect (or, in other words, when they made the “right” choice). Six months later, the Texas legislature would pass a law discouraging such procedures as these procedures have led to hundreds of wrongful convictions of innocent people.

The following week Lydell Grant was arrested on a murder warrant. He professed his innocence and had a solid alibi for the night of the murder. Nevertheless, he was immediately adjudged guilty in the media and through public comments of the Houston Police Department. Two years later, in December 2012, he was convicted of the murder based on the strength of testimony of six eyewitnesses who had identified him in a police photo spread. The jury completely disregarded Mr. Grant’s alibi and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

During trial, a forensic DNA analyst who worked for the Houston Police Department Crime Laboratory testified that she had tested the victim’s fingernails collected during autopsy in an effort to obtain the DNA profile of the perpetrator (i.e., from skin cells that may have transferred during the struggle in the parking lot). She testified that there was at least one unknown male donor to the DNA mixture (i.e., there was a DNA profile present in the mixture that was not the victim’s profile). She first testified that it was “inconclusive” whether Mr. Grant could be excluded as the “unknown male donor” to the mixture. Upon further prodding by the prosecutor, she testified that this meant that Lydell Grant “could not be excluded” as the unknown male donor to the mixture. This testimony, in conjunction with the eyewitness identification, was obviously damaging to Grant’s case and contributed to the guilty verdict.

Post-conviction, Mr. Grant lost all of his appeals and he eventually contacted the Innocence Project of Texas (IPTX) for help. Mike Ware is the Executive Director of the Innocence Project of Texas, a non-profit committed to identifying and exonerating innocent individuals who have been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for criminal offenses they had nothing to do with. IPTX receives 50-100 letters per month from incarcerated individuals claiming innocence and requesting assistance with their case. Mr. Ware also teaches an experiential law school class (clinic) at the Texas A&M School of Law in which students assist in identification of cases in which the convicted defendant may have a viable post-conviction claim of actual innocence. The phrase “actual innocence” means either: 1) a person was convicted of a crime that occurred much as the police, witnesses, and prosecutors claim it occurred, but it was committed by a completely different person (e.g., cases of mistaken eye-witness identity); or 2) a person was convicted of a crime that never occurred at all (e.g., the conviction was for arson, but it turns out the fire in question was the result of legitimate electrical problems in the building infrastructure).

In 2018, IPTX and Texas A&M Law School Clinic began reviewing Mr. Grant’s case. There were many proverbial “red flags” indicating a possible wrongful conviction, beginning with the manner in which pre-trial identification procedures (i.e., the police photo lineups) were conducted. Moreover, Mr. Grant had a corroborated narrative of innocence in his alibi. These factors alone supported that the case merited further review, study, and investigation. Fairly quickly, law student Jason Tiplitz noticed something was off with the DNA evidence. Mr. Grant appeared to be clearly excluded from the DNA mixture recovered from the victim’s fingernails. When compared to the actual trial testimony in which the State’s forensic DNA analyst testified that Grant could not be excluded, another red flag was raised. The significance of foreign DNA found under the victim’s fingernails in this kind of case was not lost on the police, even before DNA testing was performed. An early investigative report noted that the victim’s fingernails should be collected and analyzed for DNA, and that any results obtained should be compared to known suspects and searched against the CODIS database.