Profiles

Years between initial arrest and exoneration - 10
Causes of Wrongful Conviction - Prosecutorial and Police Misconduct; Eyewitness Misidentification; False Confession
Exoneration Date - January 17, 2007

Travis Hayes spent from age 17 to age 26 in prison for a murder he did not commit.

On April 5, 1997 Tommy Vanhoose, owner of Comeaux's grocery store in Bridge City, Louisiana was shot and killed by a masked gunman during a botched robbery.

Travis and Ryan Matthews, both barely 17-years old, were arrested nearly four hours later approximately eight miles away in a car similar to a car witnesses at the crime scene described as the getaway car.

Travis and Ryan were interrogated by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and gave similar accounts of their whereabouts that night. But after six hours of interrogations in which he was denied food, sleep or bathroom breaks, Travis conceded to his interrogators' version of events: that he had driven Ryan to a store in Bridge City.

The interrogations were neither videotaped or recorded but transcripts showed that for the first five hours of questioning Travis maintained that he and Ryan were not in Bridge City on the day of the murder. They were both charged with first-degree murder.

Even at the time he was tried, there were significant problems with the case against Travis Hayes:

1) DNA on the ski-mask worn by the gunman and discarded at the scene of the crime did not match Travis or Ryan.

2) The murderer was seen fleeing the scene in a getaway car after jumping headlong through the open passenger-side window. According to numerous witnesses the passenger-side window of Travis's car was inoperable and could not be opened.

3) The witnesses at the grocery store described the gunman as 5'4" to 5'7" and
140 lbs; Ryan was 6'1" and 190 lbs.

Several years after Travis and Ryan were convicted, numerous inmates reported that while they were in the Jefferson Parish jail, they had heard another inmate bragging about committing the Vanhoose murder.

That inmate is 5'7" and 140 lbs and records show he lived in Bridge City near Comeaux's Grocery and was serving a prison sentence for a murder committed less than half a mile from Comeaux's that same year. Upon learning the inmate's name, attorneys for Ryan obtained the inmate's DNA profile from his court file. His profile exactly matched the DNA profile found on the ski-mask discarded at the scene of the crime.

The prosecution performed further DNA testing on all the clothing discarded by the gunman, which did not match Travis or Ryan. While Ryan was released in August 2004 after the Jefferson Parish District Attorney's Office agreed to grant him a new trial and later dropped the charges against him, Travis was not afforded the same treatment. Instead the State argued that, although -- in addition to the DNA evidence, the description discrepancies and the car problem --  a) the only evidence against Travis was a "confession" that he had driven Ryan to the crime scene; b) Ryan had been exonerated for not having been at the crime scene; and c) All the State's evidence showed Travis and Ryan were together all day, Travis should stay in prison for being the driver of Ryan, who had been exonerated.

IPNO fought this absurd argument for nearly three years before a Jefferson Parish judge finally reversed Travis' conviction on December 20, 2006, and Travis got to come home for the holidays. Prosecutors had 30 days to re-try Travis but decided to drop all charges.