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DALLAS (AP) ― James Curtis Giles has spent nearly half of his life trying to prove he was not one of three men who gang-raped a woman in her apartment.

On Monday, after serving 10 years in prison and spending the next 14 years as a registered sex offender, a prosecutor told the court that Giles' arrest had been a case of mistaken identity, and a judge recommended he be exonerated.

If the appeals court approves state District Judge Robert Francis' recommendation as expected, Giles, now 53, will become the 13th Dallas County man to be exonerated since 2001 with the help of DNA evidence. It could take a few months for the appeals court to act on the judge's recommendation.

"I didn't have no idea that I would be found guilty ... but I knew that I wasn't going stop fighting," Giles said after the hearing.

About two dozen relatives -- including Giles' son and infant granddaughter -- packed into the courtroom, breaking into applause after Giles spoke. Then Giles, dressed in a blue suit and smiling, left the courtroom arm-in-arm with his wife, several relatives behind him. At least four other men who have been cleared through DNA in Dallas County also attended the hearing.

Despite the yearslong ordeal, Giles said he doesn't hold a grudge against the state. The judge complimented him on his positive attitude.

"This is not what I want to see as a judge, but I'm glad we can rectify as much as we can," Francis said.

Mistaken identifications by witnesses have been a problem in many Dallas County cases, said Barry Scheck, the co-director of the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal center that specializes in overturning wrongful convictions.

Dallas County has had so many overturned convictions in part because the county holds onto biological evidence for upward of 25 years, leaving the possibility for restesting after conviction, Innocence Project attorneys said. Many other labs often destroy samples once convictions are obtained.

Both the Dallas County District Attorney's office and Giles' Innocence Project lawyer, Vanessa Potkin say evidence showed Giles was innocent of the 1982 gang rape of a Dallas woman.

A man who pleaded guilty to the gang rape, Stanley Bryant, implicated two other men in the crime: a James Giles and a Michael Brown. Brown was never tried and died in prison after being convicted of another gang rape.

Police eventually arrested James Curtis Giles, who lived 25 miles away and did not match the description of the attacker given by the rape victim, Potkin said. Giles was about 10 years older and had gold teeth. He also had an alibi; he and his wife told police he was asleep in bed.

Investigators ignored another man with a similar name: James Earl Giles. That Giles lived across the street from the victim and had previously been arrested with Brown on other charges, the attorneys said. He died in prison in 2000 while serving time for robbery and assault.

The victim recently acknowledged she's no longer certain of her identification. Her husband recently identified the other man, James Earl Giles, in a photo lineup, said Assistant Dallas County District Attorney Lisa Smith.

Since his release, Giles remarried and moved to Lufkin with his wife, where they run accounting and bail bonding businesses. But Giles has been on parole and had to register as a sex offender.

"It's been humiliating every day, knowing that a sex offender was the scum of the earth," he said.

Giles plans to appear Tuesday at the state Capitol in Austin with Scheck. They are scheduled to speak at Senate hearings regarding three reform bills designed to reduce wrongful convictions in Texas.

Currently, Texas allows the wrongfully convicted to receive $25,000 for each year spent in prison, with a cap of $500,000. One bill before a Senate committee would increase the base amount to $50,000, putting Texas in line with the federal standard.

Giles would be the third exoneration since District Attorney Craig Watkins took office on Jan. 1 pledging to free anyone wrongfully convicted.

"A DA is supposed to seek justice not seek the conviction ... and sometimes when you seek justice that means that you have to free an innocent man," Watkins said. "If you understand that, then you can't argue against what we're doing here in Dallas County. Hopefully what we're doing here will spread out through the state and through the country."

Watkins, the state's first black district attorney, took over an office with a history of racial discrimination, including a staff manual for prosecutors that described how to keep minorities off juries.

Texas leads the nation with 27 DNA exonerations, one more than Illinois, according to Innocence Project figures. There have been 198 exonerations nationwide.

(© 2007 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)