Proven Innocent: Cases of Exoneration through DNA Testing

Since its discovery in 1985, DNA testing and profiling has revolutionized the way forensic science does its job. People previously convicted of heinous crimes were set free because of new DNA evidence proving them to be innocent of the crimes they were accused of in the first place.

Before the use of DNA testing became standard in forensic science, law enforcers and prosecutors rely heavily on eyewitness testimony, lie detector tests, confessions and other such forms of evidence to try their cases. However, as well all know, eyewitnesses can be scared or bribed to give false evidence, lie detector tests can be cheated and confessions can be coerced. DNA testing has given those who were wrongfully accused some hope in being able to prove their innocence.

Since its implementation in the late 1980s, DNA testing has exonerated around 17 people who were convicted of heinous crimes and sentenced to death in the United States. Many of them have spent years in the death row before being proved innocent. You will read some of their stories below.

Kirk Noble Bloodsworth

Kirk Noble Bloodsworth is a commercial fisherman from Cambridge, Maryland. In 1984, he was convicted for the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl named Dawn Hamilton. Dawn’s body was found in the woods of Rosedale, Maryland, dead of strangulation and with her panties flung at a tree a few yards away from her body.

Bloodsworth was convicted on the counts that he was seen leaving the woods at the time has occurred and that he matched the description of the suspect. It did not help that he tried to leave the county shortly after the crime was discovered. Nonetheless, Bloodsworth insisted that he was innocent and that he had never seen Dawn in his life.

Bloodsworth spent nine years in jail, two of which were as a death row inmate. When DNA testing became available in the early 1990s, he asked for a testing of the semen found in Dawn’s panties that were flung in the woods. As it turned out, the DNA in the semen did not match Bloodsworth’s DNA. He was freed and paid $300,000 in damages. Today, Bloodsworth is a program officer for The Justice Project.

Gary Dotson

In 1979, Gary Dotson was convicted in Chicago for raping Cathleen Crowell, who was 16 years old at the time. According to Crowell’s testimony, Dotson was one of three young men who chased after her and raped her. She picked Dotson from a book of mug shots that the police showed her because his face matched the composite sketch the police made out of her story.

It turned out that Crowell had consensual intercourse with her boyfriend at the time, David Bierne, and was afraid of becoming pregnant. She created the rape story as a form of explanation to her foster parents in case she did conceive as a result of sleeping with her boyfriend. As a result, Dotson was convicted and sentenced to 25 to 50 years in jail for his crime.

Guilt, however, forced Crowell to recant her testimony in 1985. The judge handling the case refused to overturn the conviction because it was believed then that Crowell’s recanting is impossible. In 1988, DNA testing proved that the semen stain found on Crowell’s body belonged to her boyfriend, and Dotson was set free.

The Ford Heights Four

On May 11, 1978, the bodies of Carol Schmal and Larry Lionberg were found in East Chicago Heights, Illinois, a town now known as Ford Heights. An engaged couple, they were robbed and murdered; Carol was also raped. Witnesses saw four men – Kenneth Adams, Verneal Jimerson, Willie Rainge and Dennis Williams – leave the crime scene at the time the crime occurred.

Despite their insistence that they were innocent of the crime, the Ford Heights Four, as the media came to call them, were convicted. Adams was sentenced to 75 years in prison, Jimerson and Williams to death, and Rainge to life without parole.

A few years after their conviction, a group of journalism students from the Northwestern University studied their case and discovered that the evidence against the Ford Heights Four was fabricated. DNA testing proved the allegations of these students later on, and the Ford Heights Four were set free in 1996. They were also paid $36 million in damages in 1999.