A Texas man spent nearly 20 years in jail without a trial before his murder charges were entirely dismissed in August 2024.
In 2006, Edric Wilson was arrested and accused of murdering the great-aunt of Joel Osteen, a popular televangelist in Houston. He has been locked up since then, maintaining his innocence while being shuttled between the Harris County Jail and the hospital because his defense attorneys and several experts believed he was "incompetent to stand trial."
"It was a stall tactic," Wilson told the Houston Chronicle. "I kept arguing, there's nothing wrong with me."
Wilson, now 47, said his lawyers insisted it would be easier to stay in a mental hospital than to receive a life sentence or the death penalty, which he believes led to him becoming trapped in the system.
"I think there were failures at every level," Sean Teare, Harris County's new district attorney who was sworn in a few months after Wilson's charges were dropped, told the Houston Chronicle. "It's a tragic case, and the thing that it spells out is, people can fall through the cracks."
Wilson's freedom came after local officials discovered he hadn't had a trial in 18 years, and the key DNA evidence was flimsier than they thought. When they tested other evidence, nothing came back to Wilson.
The Harris County Jail where Wilson was held without trial has faced overcrowding and understaffing issues for years. In 2022, it went out of compliance with the state's standard, leading to a reduction in capacity and some of the inmates to out-of-state facilities.
