ABOUT DROR'S CASE

• There is no physical evidence.
• Dror completely cooperated with police.
• Dror’s confirmed schedule and alibi absolutely prevent him from being able to commit this crime.
• All eyewitness identification was unreliable.
• Fallibility of license plate ID.
• Dror has a peaceful character.

• Dror’s Constitutional Rights violated.
• Exculpatory evidence was excluded.
• Hearsay and irrelevant evidence was introduced to inflame the jury.
• The judge demonstrated an overt bias against the defense.

• Dror’s statements to the police: The judge allowed the prosecution to introduce into evidence a statement Dror made to police. However, the Judge denied a defense motion to include the entirety of these statements based on her opinion that these statements were hearsay, although the Supreme Court has ruled that a police report is an exception to hearsay.

• 911 recordings: The surviving victims and a witness from the parking lot testified to the existence of at least two calls to 911, made both during and after the crime. These calls provided the initial descriptions of the assailant and may have contained the voice of the assailant. The prosecution and defense requested copies of the tapes. The prosecution was provided a portion of one tape. The defense was told that the second portion had been destroyed or taped over and that no additional tapes existed.

• Letters: The judge admitted into evidence letters that Dror had written to a friend almost 5 years prior to the trial. These letters were written when Dror was 15, and had absolutely no relevance to the case. They were written during a period of intense terrorist attacks on Israel and described Dror’s desire to join his friend in the Israeli Army to defend against those terrorists. As a former resident of Israel, and as a grandchild of Holocaust survivors who currently reside in Israel, Dror was upset by the unrest in the country and was committed to the safety of the country and its people. Again, the prosecution, with the help of the judge, purposefully excluded the context of the letters and used them to bias the jury. The letters had no direct relevance to the case and should not have been admitted.



• A high school notebook: The Judge admitted testimony from a high school security guard regarding a school notebook of Dror’s, which was used over 5 years prior to the trial and no longer exists. The school officer had written a report about catching Dror off campus one day. Although she wrote nothing about a notebook in her report, she claimed to remember a long passage, word for word. She offered to testify and recite this passage only after she knew the notebook no longer existed. Therefore, her recitation could not be supported by the notebook documentation itself. The testimony was hearsay.



• Travel: In the months following the crime, Dror went on two trips abroad. The prosecution made several inflammatory references that characterized these travels as attempts to flee prosecution. Dror accompanied his grandparents back home to Israel in December 1998. This trip was made only after Dror’s father confirmed with the police that there was not a warrant out for Dror’s arrest and that no charges were pending. Dror returned to Houston in January 1999, and then left for a second trip to backpack through Thailand. This is a very common excursion for Israeli youths; most Israelis of Dror’s age travel to the Far East, particularly Thailand, after completion of the army. Before leaving for this trip, Dror’s father again checked with the police. Additionally, Dror’s attorney spoke with Assistant District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal to confirm that there was no warrant and that Dror was not being sought. Before Dror ever left the country, the police and Assistant District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal indicated that he was free to leave. While Dror was in Thailand, a grand jury indicted him. Upon this indictment, Dror’s father ran several ads in an international paper to contact Dror and to alert him of the indictment. Dror’s father then sent Dror a plane ticket to go from Thailand to Mexico City, via Germany. Dror’s father would then meet him in Mexico City and fly into Houston with Dror (so that Dror would not have to face the media alone). However, Dror was arrested at passport control in Germany. He was held there until he was extradited to the United States. Assistant District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal had been informed that Dror was on his way home to clear his name. There is speculation that the District Attorney’s office arranged for Dror’s arrest in Germany to prevent him from doing so. Dror voluntarily returned to the United States.

• Many people not affiliated with Dror (lawyers, law students), attended the trial to witness two well-known attorneys at work. They observed the Judge communicating her biased attitude with her body language and facial expressions. They noted the Judge’s disrespectful dismissal of many defense objections. Some interpreted her inconsistent rulings on hearsay as both an ignorance of the law and a favoring the prosecution. The judge seemed to help the prosecution in many ways, including one incident of prompting the prosecutor to object. The Judge in this case (as are most of the judges in Harris County Felony Court) was also a former prosecutor for the Office of the District Attorney of Harris County.

• Police found no blood, not even a microscopic trace, on Dror, on Dror’s clothes, in his house, in his father’s house, in Dror’s car or in his stepmother’s car. The assailant stabbed three people. He stabbed a man twice and wrestled with him. When the assailant stabbed one woman, he ruptured her subclavian artery, an act which releases a strong spray of blood (the equivalent of water releasing from a ruptured hose under pressure). The assailant held the other woman in a bear hug, with his cheek next to hers, while stabbing her 14 times. The person who did this would undoubtedly have gotten blood on himself and his clothes.
  
  
• Police found no presence of Dror in the wig shop. There was no blood, no fingerprints, no palm prints, no footprints, no hair or any DNA evidence of Dror: There were unidentified bloody footprints in the wig shop that did not match Dror’s. (The police did not even investigate the origins of these unidentified prints). Furthermore, only six samples of blood were taken from a very bloody scene; additional samples may have included blood of the assailant.There were several palm and fingerprints that were found at the scene but were unidentified by HPD and may have belonged to the true assailant.
  

• Fibers belonged to Dror’s stepmother and grandmother: Seven fibers were found in Dror’s stepmother’s car and were NOT found to match fibers from the Wigs By Andre shop. According to experts brought by both the prosecution and the defense, the fibers resemble fibers from wigs in the wig shop; however, they are also inconsistent with fibers in the wig shop in several ways. The police only conducted one of about four possible tests on the fibers to determine their exact identity. The infrared test, (the only test they did perform), reveals inconsistencies between the fibers from the car and those from the wig shop. The fibers found in the car all had hairspray on them BUT none of the fibers and their represented wigs from the shop had hairspray on them. All of the fibers collected at the wig store were found to have been smeared in blood and dirt. Both Dror’s stepmother and grandmother wear hairpieces and wigs. Both women had also recently driven or ridden in the car. Therefore, the fibers found in the car came from the hairpiece and wig of the women who drove and rode in the car (Dror’s stepmother and grandmother).

• Dror first met with police hours after the crime had taken place, when he returned to his father’s house after playing football. Dror could have unobtrusively driven away from the police who he saw surrounding the house, but chose to park and approach the officers. He answered all their questions, immediately consented to a search of his car, his stepmother’s car, his father’s house, and his own apartment. Dror accompanied the police downtown where he gave two more statements, gave fingerprints, had his picture taken, and participated in a video line-up with five men from the jail. Dror gave the police names and numbers of people who confirmed his whereabouts for the day. They even received a statement from Dror’s father’s housekeeper that she was certain Dror had been in the house with her at the time of the murder. All of the police who testified at the trail confirmed that Dror was consistently cooperative.
  
  
• Dror’s confirmed schedule on the day of the murder absolutely prevents him from being able to commit this crime: The prosecution argued that, within approximately 30 minutes, Dror murdered a woman, stabbed two others, ran to a car, sped to his stepmother’s house, discarded a murder weapon and his clothes (in a place that no one has found), cleaned her car erasing all traces of blood (while not alerting the housekeeper inside the house), retrieved his own car, stopped at a gas station to make a phone call, drove to his apartment, changed clothes, and met his friends for football -- and all without raising any suspicion.

• The two survivors and the man in the parking lot gave varying descriptions of the assailant. There was inconsistency in the testimony regarding the assailant wearing a hat and what kind of hat he wore. They testified to the color of his hair, but how could they identify his hair color if he did in fact wear a hat? Moreover, there was also confusion over whether or not the assailant wore a stocking over his face.
  
  
• Only one witness testified she was 100% certain she could identify Dror AND she admitted her certainty only developed after seeing Dror on television, in the newspaper, and in the courtroom dressed in a prison jumpsuit. This woman had originally testified to the police that the assailant wore a stocking over his face.
  
  
• A second witness, the man from the parking lot, had previously seen Dror on numerous occasions. The second witness works in the same hospital with Dror’s father and eats in the same small lunchroom where Dror and his father frequently eat. This witness was not able to be 100% certain of the identity of the assailant.
  
  
• The witnesses were shown a photo spread of six photos that included Dror. At later dates they were shown a video line-up with six other men. Dror was the only man from the photo spread who was also featured in the video line up. The other men in the line-up did not match the description of the assailant, nor were they similar in appearance to Dror. The assailant was described as a young white man, around age 20, six feet tall, clean-shaven, with light colored hair. Dror was the only man in the line up who was young, white, six feet tall, clean-shaven with blond hair. In contrast, of the other men in the line-up, most looked significantly older, some had very dark hair, some had receding hairlines, some had facial hair, and they noticeably varied in height.
  
  
• The police excluded from their report the testimony of an eyewitness who identified someone other than Dror as the assailant and the testimony of another eyewitness who did not identify anyone at all.