A judge declared a mistrial in a capital murder case Tuesday after lawyers discovered a Dallas police detective failed to turn over more than 200 videos of evidence prior to trial.
Lacorius Hawkins was on trial for the 2021 shooting death of Christion Washington in his West Dallas apartment.
Camera surveillance footage from the apartment complex was among the 212 videos the lead detective didn’t share with lawyers, defense attorney Erin Kelley said.
Detective Josue Rodriguez testified outside the presence of the jury that he didn’t know how the videos weren’t transferred to prosecutors. His testimony came after visiting Judge Mike Snipes declared a mistrial.
Another detective downloaded the videos from the surveillance system and uploaded them onto the detectives’ case system. When not all the evidence transferred to the DA’s system, Rodriguez said he put it onto an external hard drive provided to him by a prosecutor.
“That’s what we haven’t been able to figure out,” Rodriguez said when asked why the videos weren’t shared. “I transferred everything onto the hard drive.”
Rodriguez did not go item-by-item to make sure each file was transferred, he said.
The revelation came amid Dallas police’s widespread issue preserving video evidence in violent crime cases.
Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot sat in the courtroom gallery. Moments earlier he attended a hearing in another court in which his prosecutors sought to get state District Judge Amber Givens recused from three murder cases. Givens previously criticized prosecutors’ handling of one of the cases where video evidence was deleted.
In January, Givens delayed the high-profile murder trial against Nina Marano after revelations that the lead detective failed to share hundreds of videos with lawyers. Some of the videos were permanently deleted because the detective did not save them properly.
After that trial was delayed, and as a result of other police digital storage issues reported by The Dallas Morning News, Creuzot asked police Feb. 17 to review all homicide cases filed with his office.
By Feb. 25, prosecutors learned that evidence was deleted in 14 homicide cases, Creuzot said. One case was actively in trial at that time. The defense lawyers in that case said prosecutors did not tell them evidence was gone.
Kelley, the defense lawyer for Hawkins, said she hasn’t been told any evidence in that case was deleted. She filed a motion before trial demanding prosecutors say on the record whether his case was impacted by digital storage problems. At the time, they said the case was not affected.
“I don’t believe the DA’s office knew about this,” Kelley told The News. “I believe this is a DPD issue that they need to address.”
This was Hawkins’ second trial for Washington’s slaying. Jurors in Hawkins’ first trial in December could not agree on a verdict and a mistrial was called then, too.
Hawkins is suspected of killing Washington on July 12, 2021, according to an indictment. Washington’s girlfriend told police she went to check on him the next day after he had not returned her phone calls, according to The News’ previous reports. She found him in a pool of blood, police said.
This story, originally published in The Dallas Morning News, is reprinted as part of a collaborative partnership between The Dallas Morning News and Texas Metro News. The partnership seeks to boost coverage of Dallas’ communities of color, particularly in southern Dallas- at the bottom.
