Innocence Project of Texas
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INNOCENCE PROJECT OF TEXAS
MIKE WAREt
When Gerald [Doyle] and I started practicing in the mid-80s, criminal
law, it was a much different landscape-a much different narrative that
prevailed. We were overrun with crime; criminals were bad; everybody was
guilty; everybody had to go to the penitentiary for as long as possible. The
prosecutors were the good guys; the defense lawyers were the sleazy guys. If
I at that time were to go into a district attorney's office-number one-if I
were to have asked for the conviction integrity unit, they would've had no
idea what I was talking about because that didn't come for another thirty
years or twenty-something years. But, if I were to imply that they had
convicted my client who was factually innocent, they probably would've
called security on me. I mean that was just a totally foreign concept. Innocent
people in the mid-80s-in people's minds-did not get convicted in the
United States of America, except in movies or except on TV, and then it was
so astounding it was a story-a fictional story-but a story.
The post-conviction DNA testing-I think the first postconviction DNA
exoneration was in 1989 out of Lake County, Illinois-changed all that. All
of a sudden during the nineties and early 2000s-you know case after case,
high-profile case after case-you would see science proving that someone
who everybody thought was guilty, who the whole world thought was guilty,
in fact, was not guilty. Who in fact had served years and years for a crime
that had been committed by someone else. This was proven by irrefutable
t Mike Ware has been board certified in criminal law by the Texas Board of Legal
Specialization since 1990. In 2006, he co-founded the Innocence Project of Texas. From July 2007
until July 2011, he was the Special Fields Bureau Chief for the Dallas County District Attorney's
office, and was head of Dallas County's Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU). In April 2009, Mr. Ware
was featured in Dallas DNA, a six-week television series on Investigation Discovery (ID) based
on his work with the CIU. In July 2011, he resumed private practice in Fort Worth. Mr. Ware has
an AV rating from Martindale-Hubbell, and has been voted a Texas Super Lawyer by his peers
as both a criminal defense attorney and prosecutor. In 2014, he was selected as the Percy Foreman
Lawyer of the Year by the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. In 2018, Mr. Ware was
honored with the Judge Norman W. Black Award from the LGBT Law Section of the State Bar of
Texas for his representation of the San Antonio Four, which was the subject of an award-winning
and Emmy nominated documentary, Southwest of Salem. Currently, Mr. Ware is in private
practice and is an adjunct professor at Texas A&M University School of Law. Since 2017, he has
been the Executive Director of the Innocence Project of Texas.
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Innocence Project of Texas
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