RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — Attorney General Jason Miyares has moved to support a writ of actual innocence for Michael Haas, a man convicted of sexually assaulting his two sons when they were nine and 11, in 1994.
“My mother fled a country where there was no real criminal justice system or consent of the governed,” said Miyares. “After reviewing Mr. Haas’ case, my office has concluded that he was wrongly convicted and is deserving of a writ of actual innocence. While our system is imperfect, the ability to correct wrongdoings is incredibly important and I’m proud of the work that my office does to try to right those wrongs.”
In 2000, Haas filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the circuit court which was dismissed as time-barred.
In 2003, he then filed a similar petition with the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia which was also dismissed, this time on the grounds that he had failed to prove that it was more likely than not that a reasonable fact-finder would have found him not guilty.
In 2004, he appealed this decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; the court dismissed this appeal as well.
On May 11, 2010, Haas filed in the Court of Appeals a petition for a writ of actual innocence based on non-biological evidence. Attached to the petition were affidavits by his two sons — then adults in their late twenties — recanting their testimonies given at trial in 1994, and an affidavit by their elder sister stating that the boys’ testimony had been suggested and coached by their mother and a counselor named Susan Boyles. Also attached were affidavits by two physicians questioning the reliability of the expert medical testimony that the Commonwealth had presented at trial.
In response, the Commonwealth filed a motion to dismiss the petition which attached affidavits by the children’s mother and by Susan Boyles stating that they had never coached or rehearsed the children’s testimony or encouraged them to lie at their father’s trial.
By an order entered on March 1, 2011, the Court of Appeals granted the Commonwealth’s motion to dismiss the petition for a writ of actual innocence.
The Office of the Attorney General announced support for a writ of actual innocence for Haas on Thursday, March 24.
Miyares’ support for this case came just days before his attempt to deny Terrence Richardson’s writ of actual innocence was called into question by Richardson’s counsel.
The 1994 trial
In the 1994 circuit court trial, the trial judge found the sons’ testimonies to be convincing. Gregory Neal, then an investigator with the Sheriff’s Department, interviewed the boys individually, without their mother’s presence.
They told him that their father slept in their beds with them and sodomized them as often as once a week over a long period. The younger son told him that he kept his mattress pushed up against the wall, and slightly up the wall, so he would not fall into the “crack” between the mattress and the wall while his father was “pounding” him.
The mother and the elder brother confirmed seeing the mattress in that position. Haas admitted that he sometimes slept with the boys and confirmed that his younger son pushed his mattress up against the wall. The mother claimed to have found blood on the younger boy’s sheets.
Susan Dodson, the boys’ maternal aunt, testified to several rambling telephone calls she received from Haas. In the last of these, she said that Haas’ speech was slurred, but he said: “[H]ell yeah, I did it, I’d do it again, I screwed the kids, you can go to hell with the rest of them because you can’t prove it.”
The Commonwealth presented four physicians at the trial who examined the boys in 1994, over a year after the alleged sexual abuse had occurred. Haas’ counsel never made any objections to the qualifications of the expert testimony.
The younger boy’s examination revealed a jagged appearance resulting from tearing tissue later healed but leaving marked scarring. The older boy showed enlargement and a marked decrease in sphincter tone. The physicians all testified that these findings were consistent with chronic penetration from the outside.
The photographs of the conditions revealed by these examinations allegedly “spoke volumes” in the opinion of the trial court. A footnote to the court’s 2012 decision describes these photographs as no longer appearing in the record, “for reasons unexplained.”
