| First Name | Jerry Lee |
| Last Name | Evans |
| Year of Conviction | 1987 |
| Year of Exoneration | 2009 |
| State of Conviction | Texas |
| Trial, Bench Trial, or Guilty Plea | Trial |
| Type of Crime | Rape |
| Death Sentence | No |
| Life / LWOP sentence | Life |
| Gender of Exoneree | Male |
| Race of exoneree | Black |
| Juvenile | No |
| Type of Innocence Defense |
|
| Description / Quotes from Testimony Concerning Defense | ● No witnesses called except for exoneree |
| Did the defendant testify at trial? | Yes |
| Quotes from Exoneree Testimony | “I’m under oath and I’m saying that I did not [commit the rape].” |
| Types of evidence at trial |
|
| Identity of eyewitness |
|
| Multiple eyewitnesses | 2 |
| Suggestive Procedures | Yes ● Suggestive remarks – officer provided victim information concerning suspect and told her they had a suspect. According to Dallas County D.A., Dallas police officers "were leading and encouraging" victim to pick defendant and were "enthusiastically encouraging" after identification. |
| Quotes from testimony #1 | At trial the victim testified that the officer “said that was the man that – he said, ‘Yes, that is the person that we have been looking at as a possible suspect.” The officer told the victim at or just after the i.d. procedure "that [the defendant] had one previous arrest for something — for carrying a weapon and that wasn’t necessarily the weapon, but he also had on spiked bracelets or something like that.” The victim described the attacker as having a black gove with metallooking spikes on it. At grand jury, the victim recalled the officer having told her, "they looked up and found that he had been charged once for wearing or carrying a weapon and the weapon was spiked knuckles." |
| Unreliable Identification? | Yes ● Discrepancies in description – facial hair ● Initial nonidentification and initially uncertain – eyewitness could not identify defendant from photo array |
| Quotes from testimony #2 | Eyewitness testified that "His hair is a little bit different" and "he looks a lot lighter skinned" than in photo from array. She testified that "he looks different today than he did then" and “he looks different today than he did that night.” The attacker had different facial hair. The victim said he had “some facial hair” but not amounting to a beard. The victim "was a little hesitant at first because his hair was different than it was the night that I happened and there was one picture that had hair similar to it and I said,"This guy’s hair is like it, but his face doesn’t look like it." The defendant testified that he has had a mustache and a small amount of hair on his chin, but he never had facial hair on the sides of his face. |
| Highest level reached | NR |