When It Comes to Freeing Inmates Unjustly Convicted, Dallas Stands Out : Crime: Prosecutors contend that the Texans are getting a bum rap as a practitioner of the Old West necktie party.

Five times in a little more than a year, Dallas County has freed prisoners who were unjustly convicted, earning it a reputation as a modern-day practitioner of the Old West necktie party.

Does Dallas hang first and ask questions later?

Randall Dale Adams, Martin Kimsey, Joyce Ann Brown, Michael Anthony Woten and Stephen Lynn Russell would agree; they spent a total of 44 years in prison before courts or the governor decided that they never should have been there.

But prosecutors say the county is getting a bum rap, and many defense lawyers say Dallas differs from other justice systems only in the celebrity of its wrongfully convicted prisoners.

Foremost among them is Adams, 41, released last year after more than 12 years in prison. Adams’ conviction in the shooting of a Dallas police officer was overturned after a key witness recanted his testimony and the courts found a prosecutor had withheld evidence.

His story was recounted in the film “The Thin Blue Line,” and Adams, who once was just days away from execution, now tours the lecture circuit.

His attorney, Randy Schaffer of Houston, says an Adams case could happen anywhere. “I suspect it is something that extends across the country,” he said. “I don’t think it’s limited to Dallas County.”

But it has happened with unnerving regularity in Dallas:

* Kimsey, 49, was freed Feb. 9 after spending five years in prison on a 1985 armored-car robbery conviction. A federal prisoner since has confessed to the crime. Kimsey, rearrested after being found with marijuana and alcohol, was pardoned by the governor May 21 and released two days later.

* Brown, 42, who spent nine years in prison for the armed robbery of a Dallas fur store, learned in February she would not be retried. An appeals court overturned her 1980 conviction, ruling prosecutors should have told the defense a key witness had been convicted of lying to police.

* Woten, 36, was pardoned in February after serving almost eight years for an April, 1982, grocery-store robbery; another man has admitted committing the crime.

* Russell, 37, was pardoned in April after serving 10 years. Another man confessed to the 1980 holdup of a Garland fast-food restaurant.

Another case of Dallas justice gone wrong was that of Lenell Geter, an aerospace engineer who served 16 months in prison for the 1982 armed robbery of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. The case drew national attention when it was examined on “60 Minutes.”

“If you go into any other state . . . you’ll find the same thing is going on there,” said Tom Krampitz, executive director of the Texas District and County Attorneys Assn. in Austin.

Others--among them, John Boston, executive director of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Assn. in Austin, and Ronald Huff, director of the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University--say Dallas County seems to convict an unusual number of innocent people.

“Certainly in terms of known cases . . . Dallas County has had more than one would expect,” said Huff, author of the upcoming book “Convicted but Innocent: Wrongful Conviction and Public Policy.”

Neither side has data to back up its perceptions. Legal experts say no one tracks wrongful conviction rates, except in death penalty cases. But even those who defend Dallas justice say it has characteristics not common elsewhere.

Huff advocates re-investigating many cases that date to the days of Henry Wade, the cigar-chomping prosecutor who ruled the Dallas County district attorney’s office for 36 years before retiring in 1987.

Wade pegged his employees’ promotions to the number of people they put behind bars and the length of their sentences.

Dallas still has a national reputation for promoting prosecutors on the basis of their conviction rate, said Scott Wallace, legislative director of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Alexandria, Va.

“It’s a system that tends to promote the numbers of convictions over fairness and due process. To my knowledge, that is quite unusual,” he said.

The emphasis has changed since John Vance succeeded Wade in the district attorney’s office, said Vance’s first assistant, Norm Kinne.

Conviction rates, he said, are “not as important a factor in our determination if someone is ready to be promoted. It’s just something that is taken with all the rest of his or her statistics.”

The critics cite other reasons for wrongful convictions. High on the list is “trial by ambush,” as defense attorneys have tagged prosecutors’ practice of springing new evidence at a trial.

“I think the mentality at the forefront in Dallas is, ‘Let’s hide everything we can . . . let’s play it like a game,’ ” said Schaffer, who got Adams’ conviction overturned partly because of withheld evidence.

Kinne maintains that the argument should be the other way around.

Unlike many states where both sides of a legal case are required to disclose evidence to the other, Texas criminal law is one-sided: prosecutors are required to share certain information with the defense, but defense attorneys are under no obligation to reciprocate.

“I find it strange that they can say ‘trial by ambush’ when they give us nothing in the way of discovery and we give them a whole lot. How is that an ambush? Who’s ambushing who?” Kinne asked.

Critics also cite a lack of funds for public defenders. Texas’ system of public defense offices representing the indigent is less developed than most other states, said Mardi Crawford, a staff attorney with the National Legal Aid and Defender Assn. in Washington.

In 1986, Texas ranked 39th in public defense spending, Crawford said, citing a Bureau of Justice report of the latest figures available.

Texas spends an average of $154 per inmate on public defense, she said. New Jersey spent the most--$540 per inmate--and Arkansas the least, $63.

Krampitz of the District and County Attorneys Assn. said all law enforcement authorities need better training and higher pay. And that applies to prosecutors and judges, along with defense attorneys. He said: “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”

Even those who fault Dallas’ justice system say no one should place blame solely on prosecutors.

“There’s a whole lot of other folks that have been involved in this process,” Krampitz said. Each wrongful conviction was decided by a jury, and each convict had a lawyer.

“Anybody that says the system is perfect is nuts,” said Schaffer.

“Juries bring to the courtroom whatever biases they hold outside the courtroom,” he said. “Not every defendant is guilty, not every police officer tells the truth, not every eyewitness is perfect. The problem is, in individual cases, everybody forgets all that.”