Police officer who spent 21 years in jail is cleared after ‘rape victim’ admits she lied

In what could have been one of the worst miscarriages of justice ever, a former Fort Worth police officer has spent 21 years of his life in jail for a crime he has now been found not guilty of. Brian Franklin was jailed after being found guilty of raping a 13 year old girl.

However, he has now given his first interview after being freed in May after his alleged victim admitted she lied. Talking about his release, following a retrial, which finished on Friday when he was acquitted of the crime by a jury, he said: “I knew it was going to come. I wasn’t surprised.”

When the girl admitted that she lied, he was released on $10,000 bail by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. However, Tarrant County prosecutors decided to order a retrial of Mr Franklin for allegedly sexually assaulting the girl in her dad’s back garden in 1994.

Lied

His guilt was first called into question when the girl said two years ago that she had lied in part of the evidence she gave. However, the woman, who is now in her thirties, is adamant that Mr Franklin did rape her.

The court, however, decided that because she lied in her testimony, that meant that other people during the trial did too. The girl said that she had not had sex before she was allegedly raped. However, she later told officials that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather for a number of years, but had been too scared to talk about what was going on.

Mr Franklin was acquitted after prosecutors claimed that because she had never had sex, injuries she suffered must have been caused by the former policeman. There was no DNA evidence linking Mr Franklin to the assault, so he was convicted on the strength of her testimony alone.