These are my questions: Why would the woman single this man out as her rapist? Was she lying? Was she unsure of her attacker? What were the grounds of his conviction? Was the victim white? Was the jury tampered because the assailant was black?
Lawyers: DNA evidence clears man convicted of brutal rape in 1984
NEW YORK (AP) — Lawyers say DNA evidence exonerates a 44-year-old man convicted more than two decades ago in a brutal rape. The nonprofit Innocence Project and prosecutors from the Bronx district attorney's office were to file papers Thursday asking for Alan Newton's 1985 conviction (read here about the entire case) to be vacated based on recent testing on a rape kit performed on the woman after the incident.
Officials at the Innocence Project -- a nonprofit legal clinic and criminal justice organization -- said they expected Newton would be released from prison after a hearing at Bronx Criminal Court. "Al Newton has always maintained his innocence, and he lost any chance of parole three separate times because he wouldn't admit to a crime he didn't commit," Innocence Project lawyer Vanessa Potkin said in a statement.
Newton was convicted of raping the 25-year-old woman in an abandoned Bronx building in June 1984. He was sentenced in 1985 to up to 40 years in prison. In 1994 he filed a motion asking that new DNA testing be conducted, but the request was denied because the evidence was unavailable, the Innocence Project and prosecutors wrote in court papers to be filed Thursday.
A similar request was granted four years later, but testing of the victim's clothing "failed to yield the presence of male DNA," the papers said. At the request of the Innocence Project, the Bronx district attorney's office last year asked the New York Police Department's property clerk division to search for the rape kit at an evidence warehouse in Queens. The result "conclusively excludes" Newton as the assailant, according to the papers.
Read about DNA here
1 comment:
Could she have been lying? Yes. Could she have been unsure? Well most people want the person that committed the crime against them to be punished? Perhaps, she was not sure, but rather than the one police suspected go free and who she thought maybe her attacker she lied and said she was certain.
However, eyewitness testimony is very unreliable it would amaze people how sure we think we are, but how wrong we really are.
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