A Chicago man spent close to a decade behind bars for murder – thanks to the eyewitness testimony of a witness who’s since admitted to being blind.
Darien Harris was locked up in 2011 aged 18, just a week before he graduated high school, and accused of shooting dead a man at a Chicago petrol station.
He now has a chance at freedom after star witness Dexter Saffold was revealed to be legally blind, and will get a new trial with his conviction vacated.
Harris, now 30, was jailed for 76 years for the murder of Rondell Moore after a trial in 2014 despite there being no physical evidence tying him to the crime.
All prosecutors had was Saffold’s claim that Harris was the man seen in CCTV from the BP station in South Side Chicago, who then fired the fatal shots off-camera.
‘I was trying to tell the people all this time he’s lying… and here’s what came about. He was really lying,’ Harris told CBS.
Saffold was asked about his eyesight during the trial and told the court he had no vision problems and could see clearly.
But in a 2019 CBS interview he admitted he was legally blind, though still insisted he saw Harris pull the trigger.
‘I got glaucoma due to an eye disease,’ he said.
‘They didn’t do anything wrong, because they didn’t know. I didn’t have to tell nobody about my medical history.’
Saffold also filed a federal disability lawsuit in 2003 in which two doctors confirmed he was legally blind.
Hellbound and Down 