Inmate Convicted on Blind Man's Eyewitness Testimony Is Freed

Darien Harris released from prison after 12 years behind bars
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 15, 2023 8:10 AM CST
Updated Dec 20, 2023 12:30 AM CST
A Blind Man Said the Teen Was the Killer. It Was Enough
   (Getty Images / Michal Chodyra)
UPDATE Dec 20, 2023 12:30 AM CST

Darien Harris is a free man, a dozen years after he was convicted of murder based largely on the eyewitness testimony of a man who'd been legally blind for more than a decade before testifying in the trial. Prosecutors originally said they'd retry Harris after a judge vacated his conviction, but announced Tuesday they'd drop the charges instead, CBS News reports. He was released from jail Tuesday night. "These 12 1/2 years of being gone, it wasn't easy at all," he told reporters. "But I fought, and now I'm here." He says he plans to go to law school and help others who've been wrongfully convicted.

Dec 15, 2023 8:10 AM CST

A man arrested for murder a week before he was to graduate high school in 2011, and later convicted of the crime, has had that conviction thrown out after the eyewitness who testified against him turned out to be legally blind. Darien Harris was just 18 when he was taken into custody, accused in the shooting death of Rondell Moore in Chicago. He was convicted in a 2014 bench trial that largely centered around the testimony of Dexter Saffold, who claimed to have seen Harris shoot Moore at a gas station. When he appeared on the stand, Saffold denied having vision problems. "I was trying to tell the people all this time, he's lying, he's lying," Harris, now 30, tells CBS News.

In 2019, Harris alerted CBS to medical records attached to a 2003 federal disability lawsuit filed by Saffold that stated he is legally blind and had been for more than a decade before he claimed to have witnessed the shooting. An attached doctor's note said he had "markedly reduced vision, especially at night," per the Washington Post. Interviewed in 2019, Saffold confirmed he had "glaucoma due to an eye disease." "Justice is supposed to be blind. The eyewitness is not supposed to be blind," says Harris' attorney, Lauren Myerscough-Mueller of the Exoneration Project. "The reason that it's such a big deal, I think, is that that was the main evidence against Darien," who was sentenced to 76 years in prison, she adds, per CBS. "There was never any forensics tying him to the crime."

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Saffold told CBS that authorities never knew he was legally blind so "they didn't do anything wrong." But in an interview before the 2014 trial, Saffold told an assistant Cook County state's attorney that he had glaucoma, Myerscough-Mueller says. She adds that when he denied having vision problems on the stand, he repeatedly looked at prosecutors. A Cook County judge granted Harris' request to vacate his conviction last week. He was transferred out of Menard Correctional Center but remains in custody at Cook County Jail as prosecutors plan to retry the case, a decision Myerscough-Mueller describes as disappointing, per People. Harris' family maintains that he was at home watching the NBA playoffs at the time of the shooting. (More wrongful conviction stories.)

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