Posted on Wed, Aug. 03, 2005
DNA exonerates man who spent 26 years in prison
BY ELINOR J. BRECHER
Knight Ridder Newspapers
MIAMI - (KRT) - With a son on each side hoisting his arms like a champion, a jubilant Luis Diaz proclaimed the outcome of the fight of his life.
"Victoria!" he exclaimed in Spanish - victory!
Behind him in a third-floor hallway of the Richard E. Gersten Justice Building surged a crowd of sobbing, laughing relatives Wednesday. Among them:
Children who are now the parents of children who had never met their grandfather.
A former wife who remarried, but lost neither faith nor love.
And a brother in his 70s who helped support the family when the prison doors slammed shut on Luis Diaz, branded the Bird Road Rapist.
It was 3:10 p.m., and a 26-year wrong had been righted. New DNA evidence had proven that Diaz, 67, was not the man who assaulted two women in the late 1970s.
The State Attorney's office then decided not to retry Diaz in five other cases.
"It is impossible to ignore difficulties inherent in retrying five very old cases even under the best of circumstances," read a joint motion for post-conviction relief signed by three defense lawyers and four prosecutors. "Police investigators retire; memories fade; and victims move on with their lives. ... We may never know the complete truth of the Bird Road Rapist ... but because of reasonable doubt now apparent, and under the totality of these circumstances, the State respectfully declines to continue with its prosecution of Luis Diaz."
And so Circuit Judge Cristina Pereyra-Shuminer told the small, weeping man in the red jail jumpsuit, white sandals and oversized spectacles: "You are free to go."
With shackled hands, Luis Diaz crossed himself over and over. His loved ones in the gallery erupted in cheers and applause.
Lawyers cried.
Attorney Barry Scheck, co-founder of The Innocence Project, said through tears that he has witnessed 70 to 80 such emotional scenes resulting from the project's work: using DNA to overturn wrongful convictions.
"It's the family," he said. "They knew he was innocent all along."
The judge liberated Diaz at 11:52 a.m., but an unexpected complication involving the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security delayed his courthouse departure for more than three hours.
When Diaz did leave, he did so in a crisp beige guayabera, black trousers and new, size 7 1/2 slip-ons.
Diaz, a fry cook who emigrated from Cuba in 1966, was a legal resident when he was arrested in 1979. He was ordered deported in 1999.
The convictions having been vacated, ICE had to clear him before Miami-Dade County Corrections would let him go.
Sheck assumed that had been handled in an early-morning fax confirming that ICE had lifted its detaining order on Diaz.
But, he said, corrections officials apparently misunderstood and didn't release Diaz until a second fax using oversized type - "this big," said Sheck, hands spread 18 inches apart - arrived saying, "There is no detainer!"
During a late-afternoon news conference at the law offices of Holland & Knight, someone asked Diaz to list his immediate plans.
"To see his boss and eat good Cuban food," he replied through a translator, immigration lawyer John Pratt.
So after the news conference, the family adjourned to Lila's, the Cuban eatery in a nondescript west Miami-Dade strip mall where Diaz worked briefly before his arrest.
Swarmed by reporters, he came face to face with owner Reinaldo Navarro, 61. For a moment, it seemed as if Diaz didn't recognize him.
Then they embraced, and Diaz declared, "Gloria a Dios!"
Said Navarro: "This is a great joy. I always believed he was innocent."
Waiters in red vests and bow ties applauded, ready to serve Luis Diaz as much rice, boliche asado - Cuban pot roast - and sangria as he might want.
