The US Supreme Court is to start hearing a case today where a convicted rapist is seeking access to DNA evidence he claims will definitively establish his guilt or innocence. This is a test case to establish at federal level the right to access to DNA evidence.
The case is being taken by the Innocence Project on behalf of William C Osborne, a convicted Alaskan rapist. Its lawyers have so far exonerated 232 prisoners, 17 of whom had been sentenced to death. They have the support in this case of a number of prisoners freed by the work of the Innocence Project, civil rights groups, and some current and former prosecutors.
They are opposed by victims’ rights groups, the vast majority of states, which have a patchwork of laws granting DNA access and the federal government.
The governments say that creating a constitutional right to the testing would infringe on states’ rights, overwhelm them with frivolous demands and create an endless right of appeal for those convicted of the most violent crimes.
“These statutes reflect a careful balancing of the government’s interests in finality, comity, and conservation of scarce resources,” lawyers for the state of Alaska argue, “against a prisoner’s interest in justice in those rare cases” when innocence could be proven by new forensic technology.
It is the Supreme Court’s first case that confronts the dilemma of how to deal with DNA evidence, which former attorney general John Ashcroft called the “truth machine of law enforcement”.
Osborne was convicted of the brutal rape and assault of a prostitute in a secluded area near the Anchorage International Airport in 1993. Two men had agreed to pay the woman for oral sex; instead, one forced her to perform fellatio while the second raped her.
The men ordered the woman to leave the car and lie facedown on the snow, but she ran instead. They beat her until she feigned death, and one man fired a shot that grazed her forehead.
Days later, police stopped Dexter Jackson for a driving offence and found in his car a gun and knife belonging to the prostitute. Jackson implicated Osborne as his accomplice and the rapist. The woman later identified Osborne from a photo line-up as the “most likely” and “most familiar” suspect in the group.
She said he had used a blue condom, which police found at the scene. Testing on the semen was consistent with Osborne’s DNA – but also with 14.7 to 16 per cent of all African Americans’.
Osborne’s lawyer, basing his defence on Osborne’s claim of an alibi, did not seek a more discriminating test that could clear him – or link him more conclusively to the crime.
He was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison, with five years suspended.
Osborne wants to pay for a more exacting test of the DNA evidence that was introduced at his trial – one so precise that even the state concedes it would probably prove his guilt or innocence – but he has been denied access to it by prosecutors.
Alaska is one of six states that do not have statutes allowing post-conviction access to DNA evidence, and although courts there have agreed to testing in a handful of cases, the testing has not taken place.
Among other objections in Osborne’s case, the state fought his petition in federal courts that he deserved access to the evidence under civil rights laws, saying Supreme Court precedent does not allow such a petition to attempt to invalidate a conviction.
The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco disagreed with the state’s argument, siding with Osborne that the evidence he sought would not automatically prove his innocence and could just as well establish his guilt.
The court said its decision followed the principles in another Supreme Court precedent, Brady vs Maryland, which established the defence’s right to exculpatory evidence at trial.
A brief on Osborne’s behalf filed by the ACLU, the Rutherford Institute and criminal defence lawyers said it should be clear that such a constitutional right exists, even if it has not been articulated.
“If the Constitution’s protection of individual liberty means anything, it must mean that a state cannot continue to detain someone who conclusively proves through a DNA test that he is innocent of the crime that is the basis for his incarceration,” the groups argue.
But Alaska assistant attorney general Kenneth M Rosenstein said that forcing all states to comply with a certain procedure would be a "relatively unprecedented" imposition on states' abilities to decide their own criminal procedures. (– LA Times-Washington Post)