For 18 years, one Houston-area man sat behind bars in Harris County Jail without ever seeing his day in court. Edric Wilson was accused of a high profile killing – prosecutors said he murdered Johnnie Daniel, the great-aunt of megachurch pastor Joel Osteen.
As the years went by, officials seemingly lost track of Wilson’s case as he spent nearly two decades awaiting trial. Eventually, that murder charge was dismissed. And while Wilson’s case is an extreme example, it’s hardly an outlier – data from Harris County shows that about 230 people last year had been in the jail for 1,000 days or more.
Neena Satija, investigative reporter for the Houston Chronicle, looked into how this happened, and how much it cost taxpayers. She spoke with the Texas Standard about Wilson’s case. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Tell us a little bit more about Edric Wilson’s case and how he ended up behind bars for so long.
Neena Satija: Mr. Wilson was charged with capital murder back in 2006. He also had a separate charge – unrelated case – for an aggravated assault. So they were serious charges.
He was sort of marching towards a trial, actually, for the first couple of years. And then a judge found him incompetent to stand trial. And so what that means is basically, he was deemed to be too mentally ill to be able to understand the proceedings against him.
So at this point, in order for him to have a constitutionally fair trial, he needs to get that competency restored. He had to go to a state psychiatric hospital.
The problem was that also puts your entire case on pause. And for Mr. Wilson, he went back and forth between the state hospital and back to the jail.
Some folks said that his competency had been restored and he was well enough to stand trial, his defense attorneys argued, and that legal wrangling went on for almost two decades. And that is a huge part of why his case basically got lost in the system.
Literally lost in a shuffle back and forth, it sounds like. But surely someone must have been following along with every step and saying, ‘Your Honor, we have to get some decision here.’ Why didn’t that happen?
That’s a really good question. And it was difficult, honestly, for me to get that answer.
I spoke to the Harris County DA’s office. None of Mr. Wilson’s main defense attorneys who represented him over the years agreed to speak with me.
It’s very clear everyone continued to push this decision off. You know, at one point a judge could have said ‘we need to move this case along.’ Prosecutors could have said that. Defense attorneys could have said that. It is clear, in this case, no one did.
I spoke to one defense attorney who wasn’t involved in the case, quoted in the article, who said, ‘look, high-profile victim.’ You know, as you mentioned, great aunt of prominent Houston pastor, Joel Osteen. So that’s one factor: High profile victim, DA doesn’t want to drop the case.
And on the other hand, the key piece of evidence was this one DNA test, which became weaker with time as calculations over how we understand DNA and science changed.
So really, I think one way to look at it is just no one really wanted to drop a case, no one wanted to move forward, and that went on for an extreme amount of time. And you can really see the consequences of delayed justice and kicking the can down the road in a case like this.
What’s happened with Edric Wilson now? Where is Edric Wilson?
Mr. Wilson has been released. In August of last year, prosecutors actually dismissed the capital murder case against him for insufficient evidence, and he pled guilty to the unrelated aggravated assault case.
So at that point, he’d pretty much served his entire 20-year prison sentence that he pled guilty to. He’d served that in jail. It took a few more months for him to get released, but he is now out on parole and trying to get his life back.
Obviously, you’ve got to wonder how many others might have been awaiting trial in Harris County Jail for an extended period of time or caught up in this same limbo. Is there any way of knowing?
Well, we do know that the county officials in Harris County have been doing a jail population study. That’s how they came across Mr. Wilson’s case. They have found more than a thousand individuals who have been in the Harris County Jail for over a thousand days awaiting trial. This is much longer than jails are meant to hold people.
Jails… You don’t have access to educational or rehab services in jail, for the most part. In Harris County Jail, you can’t even go outside. You can’t breathe fresh air or feel the sunlight. So you’ve got folks who were in there for three or four years. That’s not a small number, a thousand people.
There are a handful of others who’ve been in jail for even longer than that. There were other individuals who’ve been there for more like nine, 10 years that the county has talked about. So this is not an isolated case.
18 years is definitely an extreme number, but there are hundreds of people, at least in the Harris County Jail, who have been there for far too long, much longer than the jails designed to hold them, much longer than crime victims want to be waiting for justice, and just longer than the court system ever imagined, I think, they would be waiting for a trial.
So after the discovery of Edric Wilson’s case, have Harris County officials done anything to change the status quo in the judicial system or in the criminal justice system after discovering what Edric went through?
Yes, the county’s been talking a lot about this. They’ve been talking about the need for more resources for the judges so they can move cases more quickly – more resources for the system that restores competency for defendants who may not be competent to stand trial.
So that involves a lot more money, but it could also save money on the back end. Imagine how much money taxpayers spent just incarcerating someone for 18 years. So a lot of it’s gonna be about more resources for the systems so that people don’t get lost and that people have time to devote to these cases, to decide, do we want to move forward? Do we not?
That’s a huge part of the problem is just the whole criminal justice system is massively understaffed and they need more people and more resources.
