Up next...
it's late on a Friday night.
Bar patrons are
enjoying themselves...
until the m*rder.
They just start hearing
these screams from the shadows.
"Someone's trying to k*ll me.
He's trying to k*ll me.
He's trying to k*ll me."
Witnesses identify a suspect.
And soon, he's behind bars.
They just look at you and say,
"Yeah, you did it."
A prison becomes a classroom
that ultimately reveals
things not seen at trial.
Miscarriage of justice
doesn't even begin
to describe this case.
In the end, a forensic technique
refined after the collapse
of the Twin Towers
exposes a k*ller.
This is the Holy Grail
of exonerations.
If Houston, Texas,
were a country,
it would have
the 26th largest economy
in the world.
Some areas are
incredibly wealthy.
And, inevitably, some aren't.
Lydell Grant came
from a gritty area
in the southwest part
of the city.
We was a tight family.
We was just growing up in
a nice little area at the time.
I always wanted it better,
so my aspirations
was much stronger
than a lot of kids around me.
Despite a solid home life,
Lydell says he made mistakes...
and one changed his life.
When he was 16, he was sentenced
to 10 years
for what he called a minor part
in an armed robbery
and did the full sentence.
He was released in 2004.
I didn't go back
to my old playground
and mess with old playmates.
I had to change my playthings.
That was one of the main things
that I knew I had to do.
Lydell aspired to work
in the music industry
and started making a name
for himself
in Houston's
red-hot hip-hop community.
I always had the dream
of becoming
a successful music mogul,
not no artist,
I wanted to be a mogul
because music is my life.
But on December 15, 2010,
Lydell Grant's life took
an unexpected detour.
Houston police pulled him over.
I mean, as soon as
I pulled up and parked,
I had my hands up and I had
my window down, of course,
but I'm like, "Damn.
You know, all this
for a traffic violation?"
I mean, I don't even know
what I done wrong.
Lydell was handcuffed
and taken into custody.
As I get down to the station,
he said, "Well,
take him down to homicide."
I'm like, "Homicide?
I ain't never been in homicide."
Police told him he was
the only suspect in a m*rder
that had made headlines
across Houston.
Seriously, I mean,
I really, really thought
that I was being punked.
I thought it was a prank,
I was being pranked,
but this was really going on.
The m*rder happened
four days earlier.
On a Friday night,
a frantic 28-year-old man
named Aaron Scheerhoorn
ran up to a group of bouncers
outside a downtown nightclub.
As he opened up his shirt
and showed them
that he had a puncture wound,
a bloody puncture wound.
And everybody watched on
in horror.
Seconds later,
witnesses saw another man
brandishing a Kn*fe.
And it looked like
he was after Aaron.
Aaron begged the bouncers
to protect him.
The bouncers are trying
to figure out what's going on.
I think one of them said
he thought they were
in a lover's spat.
So they just kind of
shooed him away
and wouldn't let him inside.
Aaron couldn't get any
help and ran for his life.
When Aaron realizes
he can't get inside,
he runs into an adjacent
parking lot.
He doesn't get far,
and the man with the Kn*fe
chases after him,
grabs his jacket,
pulls him in close
and begins stabbing him
some more,
to the horror of the people
on the balcony of the bar
watching this unfold below.
Aaron d*ed later
at a nearby hospital.
Lots of people
had a front-row seat
to his brutal m*rder.
And with that many witnesses,
police believed they had
all the evidence they needed
to convict Aaron's k*ller.
The people
who witnessed
Aaron Scheerhoorn's m*rder
had differing descriptions
of who did it.
They gave a really broad
description of the suspect.
They said he was a black male,
he was six-feet-two-inches,
between six-foot
and six-foot-seven-inches
or something like that, I think.
The night after the m*rder,
detectives got
a potential break.
A man at the same nightclub...
a witness to the m*rder...
called to say
he just saw someone
he thought was the k*ller.
One of the employees
of the nightclub
saw him parking his car
right there
in the very parking lot
where this m*rder had
taken place 24 hours earlier.
And thought, "Well, that looks
like the guy
who committed
this m*rder last night."
Detectives traced the VIN number
on this suspect's car
and got a surprise.
The driver... Lydell Grant...
was an ex-convict.
His mugshot was on file.
First, they went to the witness
who had seen Mr. Grant
get out of the car.
And they went to him
and they said,
"Is this the person
who did it?"
Or words to that effect.
And that witness did pick
Mr. Grant's photo.
Out of a large group
of witnesses,
seven people claimed to have
a clear view
of Aaron Scheerhoorn's k*ller.
Separately, they were shown
a photographic lineup
of six different Black men...
among them, Lydell Grant.
They take that photo lineup
and give it to seven
of the eyewitnesses
they talked to
a couple nights before.
Turns out that six
of the eyewitnesses
point Lydell out
of the photo spread
and say, "This is the guy."
Soon afterward,
Lydell Grant found himself
behind bars... again.
Just out of nowhere, that quick,
my life was snatched away.
My life was snatched away
for something
that I have been accused of.
Lydell
told police he had no idea
who Aaron Scheerhoorn was.
As for his whereabouts
at the time of the m*rder?
He said he was bar-hopping
with a friend.
And Lydell's friend
backed up his alibi.
Lydell doesn't dispute
that he was in the area.
And he has this great
alibi witness.
And this alibi witness
testifies Lydell
was never acting strange.
He was never acting in a way
that would suggest
he k*lled someone.
Detectives were unconvinced
and said they had
forensic evidence
that could tie Lydell
to the m*rder.
Aaron Scheerhoorn
fought for his life
and scratched his k*ller.
Skin cells were found
under his fingernails.
There was
Aaron Scheerhoorn's DNA.
Of course, there's going to be
his DNA, it's his fingernails.
And there was an unknown
male contributor
obviously foreign
to Aaron Scheerhoorn's.
There was clearly
a foreign contributor
in that DNA mixture
that was recovered
from the victim's fingernails.
The police knew at the time
that that was going to be
the perpetrator's DNA.
Lydell had
no scratch marks on his body.
The DNA sample was tested
by an analyst
with the Houston
Police Department crime lab.
The state's DNA expert
called the DNA mixture
in this case inconclusive,
said it was too complex
of a mixture to interpret.
Inconclusive means inconclusive.
It means you can't draw conclusions
about someone's inclusion
in that DNA mixture
or their exclusion.
But how that evidence
is interpreted
sometimes comes down
to how prosecutors
convey the science to a jury.
The issue is
how good was
the interpretation of the data.
So, for example, in this case,
is Lydell Grant's DNA
under the fingernails
of the victim?
I don't know, it's inconclusive.
So when prosecutors
determined their DNA evidence
was likely
not enough to convict,
they relied primarily
on their six eyewitnesses,
an unusually high number.
All six said they were sure
Lydell was the man
who k*lled Aaron Scheerhoorn.
When someone comes to court
and the prosecutor says,
"Sir or ma'am,
do you see the person here
in the courtroom today
who you saw m*rder the victim?"
And they say, "Yes,
Mr. or Ms. Prosecutor,
that's him over there.
I would know him anywhere.
That's the man
I saw commit the m*rder."
And that's very powerful
to a jury
because people are like, "That's
an eyewitness, you know?"
They're saying, "That's him.
In December of 2012,
Lydell Grant was convicted
of first-degree felony m*rder
and sentenced to life in prison.
Your heart drops.
It's like life just being
sucked out of you,
just being squeezed
up out of you.
It's like being crushed.
But Lydell knew he was innocent
and was determined to prove it.
So he turned his jail cell
into a law school
and a forensic-science
classroom.
I was able to re-transfer
my mind into thinking that,
"Hey, I'm going to school.
I fitting to go to law school."
That enabled me to go ahead
and really just live like
I was on a college campus.
After his conviction
for a m*rder
he said he didn't commit,
Lydell Grant was determined
to turn his jail sentence
into an opportunity.
He became a fixture
in the prison's library.
The only way that
I'm going to get out
is for me to get up,
go down there,
and get my nose in them books
and learn the law.
That way I can use
the same thing
that they used to convict me.
I can use it
to un-convict myself.
Because I knew, once again,
that I did not k*ll no one.
I knew it.
Lydell learned
that DNA technology
at the time of his trial
in 2012 was so advanced
it should have been able
to identify the k*ller's DNA.
And the main evidence
against him...
the eyewitness
identifications...
they're notoriously unreliable.
Lydell sent dozens of letters
asking for help.
One reached the desk
of Mike Ware,
both a former prosecutor
and criminal defense attorney,
now the executive director
of the Innocence Project
of Texas.
Ware asked his students
at Texas A&M's School of Law
to dive into the case.
We have to do a lot
of internal vetting,
because we get so many letters,
before we actually take a case.
Now, this came in as just one
of thousands of letters
we get every year.
By this time,
Lydell had been
in prison for six years.
The Innocence Team soon realized
he'd done his homework.
The Innocence Project
of Texas said,
"We see that you have something
that is promising."
Them words right there,
I stopped right there.
Got emotional.
It was an overdue time.
It should have been came.
But I got to say,
God is always on time.
Lydell's new legal team
homed in
on the eyewitness testimony...
the keystone
of the case against him.
According
to the Innocence Project,
nearly 260 people
in the U.S.
have had their convictions
overturned after DNA evidence
showed eyewitnesses
were mistaken.
People's memory is not
a perfect camcorder,
so to speak.
People can be shown photographs
that change their memory.
All kinds of things
can change people's memory.
There's all kinds
of psychological experiments
that have proven that.
Even worse,
study after study shows
that cross-racial
eyewitness identifications
are particularly unreliable.
And in Lydell's case,
only one of the witnesses
who testified was Black.
Lydell gets convicted.
Mainly the six eyewitnesses
that the jury really hung onto
their word of, "His face
was b*rned into my memory."
They pointed Lydell out
in court.
Just really confident
eyewitness testimony
that influenced jurors.
Lydell's new legal team
knew that attacking
the eyewitness identifications
was not nearly enough
to prove his innocence.
It is so much easier
in our system
to convict and incarcerate
or even execute
a completely innocent person
than it is to exonerate
a completely innocent person
once they've been convicted.
But while witnesses
can be unreliable...
or completely mistaken...
DNA is a more impartial witness.
Lydell's team turned to
the so-far inconclusive DNA
under
Aaron Scheerhoorn's fingernails.
Raw data from that sample
was sent to Angie Ambers.
She focused on parts
of the DNA known as alleles.
An allele is a variation
that's observed
at a particular DNA marker.
There were 26 alleles
in this DNA mixture
that not only did
not match the victim,
but they also did
not match Lydell Grant.
I thought, "Wow, this is not
an inconclusive DNA mixture."
That, of course, differed
from the "inconclusive"
determination
made by the prosecution's
DNA analysts
at Lydell's trial.
Dr. Ambers contacted
Mike Ware with the news.
He was ready to move
forward with the appeal.
I said, "But wait.
The method that I use,
the manual interpretation
of the mixture
is not what the current
accepted method is."
The more accepted method
is called
probabilistic genotyping.
It uses computer power to do
a statistical analysis
of the differences
in DNA samples,
ultimately producing
a match probability.
And it's been very successful
with mixed DNA.
What we do now
with DNA mixtures,
we use artificial intelligence.
We use computer software
programs to interpret that data.
The software program
is designed
to be utterly impartial.
All the computer sees
and compares
are codes generated
by the differences
between samples of DNA.
The question now was whether
the program could prove
if Lydell Grant
was innocent or not.
When the World Trade
Center came down in 2001,
the remains of some 2,700 people
were mixed in
among the dust and rubble.
In a scientific landmark,
a company called Cybergenetics
used a DNA computer
software program
called TrueAllele to reanalyze
of those remains,
ultimately tying many back
to the individual victims.
What TrueAllele does,
is it unmixes mixtures.
So, it can take the data
that a crime lab generates
from an evidence sample,
and take low level or mixed DNA
and find the genotypes
of each person
who left their DNA
in that evidence.
If TrueAllele could
identify separate DNA profiles
mixed together in the wreckage
of the Twin Towers,
could it identify the DNA
of one single person...
the unknown person
whose DNA ended up
under Aaron Scheerhoorn's
fingernails?
Analysts at Cybergenetics
took the raw DNA data
from Lydell's case
and essentially
used computers to separate
the two different
genetic contributors
in that sample.
TrueAllele showed, statistically,
that Lydell Grant's DNA
was not present
in the fingernail sample.
It just wasn't there.
The probability of a coincidence
was 10 trillion times
more probable
than an actual match
between the fingernails
and Lydell Grant.
He wasn't there.
wrap my head around that.
I mean, that's... that's more
people than we have on Earth.
The next question...
If the unknown DNA
wasn't Lydell's, whose was it?
The DNA was entered
into CODIS...
the national DNA
criminal database.
There was a hit.
We found the actual person
whose DNA was left
under the victim's fingernails.
And that was thrilling.
His name was Jermarico Carter.
He was a year younger
than Lydell
and roughly the same height
and weight.
They both had short hair.
But other than that,
they didn't resemble each other.
The DNA left no doubt.
All six eyewitnesses
got it wrong.
Jermarico Carter was the k*ller.
He is the perpetrator
of this crime.
He had left Houston shortly
after this m*rder
took place and gone to Atlanta.
And in fact,
engaged in a violent crime there
that involved a stabbing.
When Carter was told
of the DNA evidence against him,
he confessed.
To this day investigators
are unsure
why he k*lled Aaron Scheerhoorn.
We felt like we had solved
this case for the police
and for the
District Attorney's Office.
Free at last!
Free at last!
Victory! Victory!
Yes! Yes!
After nine years behind bars
for a m*rder he didn't commit,
Lydell Grant was a free man.
What have these last
nine years been like for you?
The last nine years.
Man, I feel
like an animal in a cage,
especially knowing
that I didn't do it.
How did this
miscarriage of justice happen?
For one, Aaron Scheerhoorn's
m*rder was chaotic.
According to police,
Jermarico Carter chased him,
stabbed him, chased him
and stabbed him again.
Not exactly an ideal situation
for people to make
an eyewitness identification.
Even worse, the witnesses
were some distance away
and the scene had
very little light.
It happened outside a bar.
Alcohol was involved.
And it appears detectives
were so convinced
they had their man,
they might have,
consciously or unconsciously,
led their witnesses
to Lydell's picture
in the photographic lineup.
There are many different ways
in which the police...
knowing who the suspect is...
can steer the person to pick the
person they want them to pick.
They don't even realize
what they're doing.
The Houston Police Department
and the Harris County
District Attorney's Office
declined to be interviewed
for this program.
Since Lydell's arrest,
Texas has overhauled
how it handles photo lineups.
Now it needs to be a...
They call it
a double blind lineup.
An administrator,
a blind administrator,
so to speak,
someone who doesn't know
who the suspect is gives
the lineup to the witnesses.
For Lydell Grant,
being the mastermind
of his own exoneration
makes freedom especially sweet.
He's back in the music business,
using his own life story
in his songwriting.
He's eager to let the world know
that, despite everything,
he's grateful for the science
that freed him
and bears no grudges.
"Victory is mine,"
said the Lord,
and I'm going to just let
the world know that,
"Hey, man, it's forgiveness
in this world.
Don't be mad at nobody.
Life is too short.
Just go through it, thank God,
forgive them, and keep moving."