Former Fort Worth Officer Found Not Guilty In New Rape Trial

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FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM/AP) - Former Fort Worth Police officer, Brian Franklin was found not guilty Friday following new trial.  He was initially convicted of rape in 1995 and had been fighting for a new trial since 1998.

It took jurors a little more than an hour to find Franklin not guilty after he spent 21 years in prison.

The woman who said he raped her when she was 13, acknowledged in 2014, that she lied in part of her testimony against him in 1995, but still insisted the officer was guilty of the attack.

She faced Franklin, in an unusual state district court hearing ordered by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which in recent years has changed how it reviews allegations that someone did not receive a fair trial.

The appeals court, the state's highest for criminal cases agreed to review the appeal filed by Franklin under the same argument it denied more than a decade ago: that a witness potentially lying was enough for a new trial.

The woman, whose name is being withheld by The Associated Press because the case involves rape allegations, said she lied when testifying that she never had sex before Franklin raped her in her father's backyard in March 1994. A few years after Franklin was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, she told authorities her stepfather had been raping her years before the assault by Franklin.

Dick DeGuerin, one of Franklin's attorneys, asked the woman back in 2014, "But the fact is you did lie, didn't you?"

"Yes, I did," the woman replied.

She testified that she feared her stepfather. She said he stayed in the courtroom during Franklin's trial and accompanied her during police and doctor appointments beforehand.

"He was there everywhere I went," she said.

The stepfather received 10 years' probation after pleading guilty to injury of a child, according to then Tarrant County district attorney's spokeswoman Melody McDonald Lanier.