Published on: Thursday, May 13, 2021

A former Dallas County prosecutor quietly surrendered his law license after the State Bar of Texas said he withheld evidence that led to the wrongful convictions of two men in the slaying of a South Dallas pastor (article available here).

The State Bar concluded that Richard E. “Rick” Jackson failed to inform Dennis Allen and Stanley Mozee’s defense attorneys about evidence that could have cleared them at their 2000 capital murder trials. Texas courts found Allen and Mozee wrongfully spent 14 years in prison, vacated their convictions, declared both men “actually innocent,” and released them from prison in 2014.

The Innocence Project of Texas filed a 196-page grievance with the State Bar in 2018 against Jackson.

Richard “Rick” E. Jackson is just the fourth lawyer in the country to lose a law license after egregious misconduct that led to a wrongful conviction.