Does the name James Waller sound familiar to you? How about Andrew Gossett or Larry Fuller?

If they don’t, they should. These men, along with many others, have been wrongfully convicted of some pretty heinous crimes. (Waller was found guilty of raping a 12-year-old boy.)

A dozen men in Dallas County alone have been exonerated thanks to DNA evidence in the past five years. That’s more than any other county in the nation.

To top it off, The New York Times was the newspaper that reported it-not the Morning News.

What’s going on here? How could twelve men have been so severely punished for crimes they didn’t commit? And why doesn’t anyone in Dallas seem to care?

Waller was convicted on the eyewitness testimony of two witnesses, the victim and another woman who said she’d seen him that night near the boy’s apartment.

Problem is, the boy admitted that his attacker had a bandana around his face, and the woman – the apartment manager for the complex-identified him, saying she’d never seen him before the boy was raped.

Funny, considering that as the apartment manager she should probably be familiar with the only black man living in the complex. But race probably had nothing to do with it…

Rape is a serious crime. So’s murder. These seem like obvious statements, but apparently the citizens and prosecutors of Dallas don’t quite get this; it took the jury less than an hour to convict Waller based on only a few hours of testimony.

In our justice system, the burden of proof is supposed to be high, extraordinarily high – so people don’t serve 20 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. So the real criminals and child rapists aren’t still wandering around free decades later at the expense of an innocent man.

If Dallas wants to serve the interests of justice instead of just trying to save face on this one, city officials will have to come clean. Hopefully new District Attorney Craig Watkins will make the process an easier one by allowing court proceedings to be part of the public record. And lawmaker Rodney Ellis of Houston has the right idea, too; he wants to create a commission that will study exonerations in order to prevent more wrongful convictions.

Because the real tragedy would be if Dallas-and Texas-learned nothing from Waller’s perseverance.