This is the second in a two-part series about the lingering effects of Detroit's rape kit backlog. You can find part one here.
A note to readers: This story contains references to sexual violence.
Terance Calhoun spent 15 years in prison for the crimes of another man.
And while Calhoun was in prison, Lionel Wells committed a string of sexual assaults that should have been impossible — because Calhoun was already behind bars for one of them.
These are among the still-unfolding consequences of Detroit's rape kit backlog. In 2009, an assistant Wayne County prosecutor made a shocking discovery: more than 11,000 untested sexual assault evidence kits in an abandoned Detroit police warehouse. It took a decade to test all those kits, and prosecutors are still building cases based on the evidence found there.
In the first part of this story, we looked at the toll it can take on survivors of Detroit’s rape kit backlog to come forward and help prosecute their cases many years later.
But this process has uncovered other miscarriages of justice, including one man wrongly imprisoned for the crimes of a serial rapist. In this second part of our story, we explore what happened to Terance Calhoun — and how his wrongful conviction shows the justice system failing at nearly every turn.
“They didn’t have to be one of those victims”
In a 2018 TED Talk, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy laid out how the effort to test Detroit’s rape kit backlog yielded some stunning, disturbing findings. Those findings upended some assumptions that many criminal justice experts had long held.
One of the biggest surprises: serial rapists are far more common than anyone thought.
“We have identified 861 serial rapists just within this project,” Worthy told the audience during a 2018 talk hosted by UPS in Atlanta.
By “project,” Worthy meant the now decade-plus efforts to test Detroit’s thousands of neglected rape kits, investigate as many cases as possible, and prosecute the offenders. The testing was completed in 2019, but investigations and prosecutions are still very much ongoing.
But there are time and resource constraints on how many cases prosecutors can pursue. So Worthy’s office has put a special emphasis on the worst ones: serial offenders identified through DNA.
Worthy said that every time she meets one of those offenders’ victims, she thinks about how Detroit’s longtime failure to test rape kits — or pursue many rape cases at all — allowed this to happen. “I look into their eyes and I think to myself: ‘They didn't have to be one of the ones that was raped. They didn't have to be one of those victims,’” Worthy said.
One of those serial rapists was a man named Lionel Wells. Between 2006 and 2014, he targeted and sexually assaulted at least five girls walking alone on Detroit’s west side. All were teenagers; the youngest was a 13-year-old middle schooler. Some of the girls were on their way to school when Wells attacked them.
But that should have been impossible. Because someone was already behind bars for one of Wells’ crimes — a young man named Terance Calhoun.
“Swallowed and ground up by the criminal justice system”
Maurice Possley is a former investigative journalist for the Chicago Tribune, where he reported on the patterns and police practices that led to dozens of wrongful convictions in that city. He now works for the National Registry of Exonerations, a database that highlights the stories of the wrongfully convicted. He said Calhoun’s story has just about all the tell-tale elements typically found in wrongful conviction cases.
“It's an incredibly sad, tragic case of someone who just kind of was swallowed and ground up by the criminal justice system,” Possley said.
In 2006, Calhoun was 19 years old when Detroit police picked him up from a liquor store near where two young women had been attacked. He was charged with rape, attempted rape, and kidnapping. His case never went to trial — Calhoun pleaded no contest, and in early 2007 he was sentenced to 17 to 32 years in prison.
It seemed like an open-and-shut case. Police had Calhoun’s confession, and the two victims had identified him as their attacker. But it's in the details that the case against him starts to unravel.
One key fact: Terance Calhoun is cognitively disabled. He was receiving Social Security disability benefits at the time of his arrest. His lawyers and family members say his mental capacity is roughly that of a 10-year-old. A forensic psychiatrist who interviewed him found him cognitively impaired, but competent to stand trial.
Possley said that’s typical of people involved in false confession cases. “One of the things that we found was that people who are mentally ill, or have cognitive deficits, or are young, are all susceptible to police manipulation,” he said.
Possley said there are other clues in Calhoun’s confession, too. One way to know whether a confession is valid is to look at whether it matches the victim’s statement about the crime. In Calhoun’s case, there were multiple points where it didn’t. For example, Calhoun said he choked one of the young women during the attack — something neither of them reported. There were several discrepancies like this.
“Terance was failed”
It wasn't just the confession, though. Calhouns's conviction was also based on a police photo lineup. Both of the victims picked Calhoun out of the lineup.
Tabitha Harris and Angie Jackson think they have a pretty good idea of how that happened, in spite of Calhoun's innocence. Together, Harris and Jackson make up the Wrongful Conviction Unit of the State Appellate Defender Office (SADO).
Jackson said once they started delving into the timelines, they noticed something: Police indicated the witness identifications took place one minute apart. That suggests the victims were together when they made their IDs, a violation of normal police procedure.
And then there was the fact that one of the victims described her attacker as having braids and a puzzle tattoo. Calhoun had neither of those things.
But the strongest evidence for Calhoun’s innocence came from DNA. A discarded condom was found at the scene of one of the crimes he was accused of. He was convicted and sentenced while the test results were still pending. When those results came back shortly afterward, they excluded him as the perpetrator.
But for reasons no one has publicly explained, Detroit Police never turned those results over to the prosecutor’s office or Calhoun’s defense team.
Maurice Possley said the public will likely never know exactly how or why that happened, but he believes someone in the justice system was aware of that file. “It was sitting there, so someone had to have seen it,” Possley said. “And either it didn't register, or they didn't care.”
Those DNA results were uncovered in early 2019, during an audit of cases in the rape kit backlog. This time, prosecutors forwarded the results to Calhoun’s attorneys at SADO. Re-testing confirmed the initial result. The DNA on that condom was not Calhoun’s.
But it did match the DNA of someone else who was in law enforcement databases by that time: Lionel Wells. Though he was still unidentified at that point, investigators knew from rape kit testing that he was the same person behind at least four other sexual assaults in Detroit, all of them committed while Terance Calhoun was behind bars.
Jackson said all these facts add up to one of the most egregious wrongful conviction cases she and Harris have ever seen.
“I think that’s where the case stands out,” she said. “It’s like every single point in the timeline of this case, something went wrong and Terance was failed.”
Exoneration comes, but tragedy remains
By that point, Calhoun’s attorneys and the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office were working to free Calhoun. His exoneration hearing was set for April 22, 2022. Calhoun’s family came up from Tennessee, expecting him to be released that day.
But there was one more shocking thing yet to come. Here’s how it unfolded at Calhoun’s exoneration hearing, as described by WDIV-TV news reporter Priya Mann in a story that day:
Mann: “Everything was going as planned, until a Detroit police officer showed up claiming he had new evidence. Now, he knows the judge and tried talking to her…of course, that’s not how the process works. And keep in mind, DNA evidence has cleared this man [Calhoun]. Instead tonight, he remains in jail…”
That Detroit police officer was Detective Robert Kane. He was one of the officers in charge of Calhoun’s case, the one who took his later-discredited “confession.” And the “new evidence” he approached the judge with wasn’t new at all, according to prosecutors. It was simply Calhoun’s case files that had already been thoroughly investigated, but missing one crucial piece: the DNA results that excluded him as the perpetrator.
Two years later, Angie Jackson and Tabitha Harris still get visibly upset when talking about what Kane did. They call it “outrageous” and “inappropriate.”
“It just made us so angry. And I think it reinforced why we do the work that we do,” Harris said.
“I can't articulate enough how bold and brazen, how wrong that was, for the cop [Kane] to step forward the way that he did,” added Jackson.
The Detroit Police Department did not respond to multiple inquiries about Kane’s actions that day, or whether he was disciplined for them. In a statement made to the Detroit Free Press at the time, DPD leaders said Kane’s actions violated department policy and were “not how the administration expects our investigators to act.”
And ultimately, the stunt didn’t work. Calhoun was officially exonerated five days later, and released into the arms of his family. He’s been living with them in Tennessee ever since.
But Harris said there are still two great tragedies here. One is the 15 years Calhoun spent behind bars for crimes he didn’t commit.
“Here you have just a young African American person who was basically expendable,” Harris said. “And that's just kind of how it is.”
The other tragedy is the trail of victims that Lionel Wells left in his wake: Because Calhoun was in prison, a serial rapist was not. Lionel Wells went on committing crimes for years.
Maurice Possley said that’s not an uncommon outcome. “It's a residue of the wrongful conviction that is particularly tragic,” he said. “Other people are harmed by the real perpetrator.”
As for the crimes Terance Calhoun never committed: they turned out to be the actions of two separate serial rapists.
One of them — the guy with the braids and the puzzle tattoo — was already incarcerated by the time Calhoun’s exoneration got rolling. The other one was Lionel Wells. He was finally sentenced to five concurrent 25- to 50-year prison terms in September 2022 — 16 years after he committed his first known sexual assault.
