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Around 11:30 p.m. on August 1, 1982, three Black men armed with guns entered the house of a Dallas couple. One of the men was an acquaintance of the couple, but the couple didn't know the other two. While one of the men robbed the male victim at gunpoint, the other two raped the female victim, who was 18 years old and five months pregnant. The men then forced the woman to go with them to a nearby grassy area, where they told her to remove her clothes. The three men raped her repeatedly before releasing her.
She returned home and police took her to the hospital, where a rape kit was collected.
The female victim identified a photo of Stanley Bryant, the perpetrator who was an acquaintance of the couple, on the day after the attack.
A month after the crime, a Crime Stoppers tip that one of the rapists was named “James Giles” led police to suspect 28-year-old James Curtis Giles, who lived about 25 miles away in Duncanville. Not only was Giles a decade older than the person the victim described, but he also had two prominent gold teeth, which the victim had never mentioned.
When shown a photographic lineup that included Giles’s photograph, she identified him as one of the three rapists. The male victim did not identify Giles. Based on the victim’s identification, Giles was arrested in January 1983 and charged with aggravated rape.
In June 1983, Giles went to trial in Dallas County Criminal District Court.
The victim identified him as her attacker.
Giles testified that he ate dinner at a restaurant with his wife on the night of the crime and then they went home, going to bed early.
On June 9, 1983, Giles was convicted of aggravated rape and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
In 1984, Bryant pled guilty to being one of the attackers and was sentenced to 23 years in prison. In 1985, he signed an affidavit that Giles was not the “James” who participated in this crime.
In 1989, while in the commissary line in the Coffield Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections, Giles met Marvin S. Moore, who had lived near the victims. He said he had been the man who called Crime Stoppers during the investigation of the crime and told them that one of the perpetrators was named “James Giles.”
Moore told Giles that he had since learned that the person he was referring to in the call to Crime Stoppers was James Earl Giles, who was a juvenile and lived across the street from the victim.
In 1991, the Dallas County District Attorney’s office began investigating Giles’s claim that he was innocent. However, the investigation went nowhere. Giles was paroled on July 28, 1993, and required to register as a sex offender.
The Innocence Project began to investigate Giles’s conviction in 2000. As part of the investigation, Giles’s legal team learned that prior to Giles’s trial, Bryant had told law enforcement the identities of the two other attackers, but that statement had not been disclosed to Giles’s defense lawyer. In the statement, he named Michael Brown and James Earl Giles.
In 2003, DNA testing revealed the profiles of two male perpetrators and excluded Giles. One of these profiles was identified as Bryant. In 2005 and 2006, additional DNA testing identified the second DNA profile as that of Michael Brown. By that time, Brown and James Earl Giles were dead.
As part of the re-investigation, Brown's sister signed an affidavit stating that Brown and James Earl Giles were good friends in the early 1980s. She also confirmed that James Earl Giles lived across the street from the victim at the time of the crime.
On February 22, 2007, Innocence Project attorney Vanessa Potkin and the Dallas County District Attorney’s office jointly requested that Giles’s conviction be vacated, submitting a state writ of habeas corpus.
Following a hearing on April 9, 2007, Dallas County Criminal District Judge Robert Francis agreed and recommended that the conviction be vacated. On June 20, 2007, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted the writ and vacated Giles’s conviction. The case was then dismissed.
Giles was subsequently awarded $1,164,000 in state compensation plus a monthly annuity of $6,300.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 02-03-2026
