On November 21, 1981, Henry James knocked on his neighbor’s door in Westwego and told her about a car accident that her husband had been involved in that led to the husband’s arrest. At about 6:00AM on November 23, 1981, the neighbor woke to find a Black man in her home, who threatened to kill her and her kids if she did not stay quiet. He raped her at knifepoint. In her first statement to police, the victim reported that she did not know the assailant. The next day, police canvassing the neighborhood saw Henry James and thought that he resembled the description given by the victim. A photo book with 75 photos was shown to the victim. She picked out Mr. James, her neighbor who had spent the day with her husband, from this book. Though she was asked to, the victim did not look at any other photos in the book after finding Mr. James; she knew he was the perpetrator. She later identified him from a live lineup in which the other participants did not resemble her description.
Though serological testing of sexual assault samples revealed that the perpetrator was a non-secretor and that Mr. James is a secretor, a jury convicted Mr. James of aggravated rape in April 1982, based on the victim’s cross-racial identification. He was sentenced to life without parole.
Innocence & Justice Louisiana worked with the Innocence Project to find the rape kit, combing through boxes of old evidence with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office Crime Laboratory director. No evidence was found. Months later, while looking for evidence in an unrelated case, the director found misfiled evidence from this case. The Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office agreed to post-conviction DNA testing.
In September 2011, the laboratory reported that Mr. James was excluded as the perpetrator of this rape. Mr. James was exonerated in October 2011, having spent close to 30 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.