 |
In this Feb. 21, 2007 file photo, Kirk Bloodsworth talks with reporters at a news conference in Annapolis, Mr. Bloodsworth spent two years on death row and was later released because of DNA evidence. He is one of more than 2,000 people falsely convicted of a serious crime who have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years, according to a new national registry, or database, painstakingly assembled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. It is the most complete list of exonerations ever compiled. Photo: Don Wright / AP |
On this day, July 24, in 1984, a 9-year-old girl's body was found in a wooded area near her home in a Baltimore suburb. Dawn Hamilton, of Rosedale, had been raped, strangled and beaten with a rock. Unfortunately, Hamilton and her family were not the only ones to suffer because of this terrible crime.
After witnesses saw a suspicious man in the area of the murder scene, a police sketch was publicized on television and in newspapers. Two weeks later, an anonymous caller identified Kirk Bloodsworth, a 23-year-old ex-Marine, as the man in the sketch. Bloodsworth, who had been in Baltimore (which is close to Rosedale) at the time of Hamilton's murder, later returned to his home in Cambridge and told friends that he had done something that would harm his marriage.
Prosecutors, with little evidence other than this, accused Bloodsworth of murder. During the trial in 1985, the defense presented several witnesses who said that they were with Bloodsworth at the time of the murder. Disregarding his alibi, the jury convicted Bloodsworth and sent him to death row.
For the next seven years, Bloodsworth maintained his innocence while in prison. In the meantime, forensic DNA testing had come of age. On Dawn Hamilton's underwear, police had a spot of semen, smaller than a dime, and science had finally progressed to the point where this small amount of physical evidence could be tested. When Bloodsworth's attorneys were eventually granted permission to test the semen spot, Forensic Science Associates, a private California laboratory, found that it did not match Bloodsworth's DNA.
After the FBI's crime lab confirmed this test, prosecutors in Baltimore County had no choice but to release Bloodsworth (but pointedly refused to apologize). On June 28, 1993, nine years after first going to jail, Kirk Bloodsworth was released. He was officially pardoned later in the year.
Since the advent of forensic DNA testing, as many as 50 prisoners have been found innocent of crimes for which they had been convicted.
0 Comment:
Post a Comment