What if you were wrongly accused of
something you didn’t do? Not anything small like stealing from a store, but
something huge like raping and murdering someone. Would you give up thinking
there would never be a chance to prove your innocence now that you are stuck in
jail? Or would you do anything to prove your innocence? Sometimes proving your
innocence is as simple as getting your DNA tested again and putting that before
a court again.
A podcast originally aired on April
19, 2002 called “210: Perfect Evidence” talked about how DNA has been helping
free wrongly convicted prisoners. One of the cases they talked about which they
called “Hawks and Rabbits.” In this case a few teenagers were convicted for
raping and murdering a girl in 1986. She was found near the railroad tracks
with her head bashed in by a rock. No arrests were made for quite some time,
this led to the community becoming restless and the police becoming pressured.
Eventually the police made an arrest, 16-year-old Larry Ollins. The officers interrogated
him but were unable to get a confession so they turned to his friend,
Marcellius Bradford and his 14-year-old cousin, Calvin. The officers beat up
Marcellius until he gave in and signed the confession. They lied to Calvin
saying that he could go as soon as he signed a confession, instead they locked
him up along with Larry. While locked up Larry heard the news on TV and they
were telling people what had happened at the crime scene, which later they
found out was completely bogus. The police officers brought in Omar Saunders
and told him that he was to say that he was breaking into some railroad cars
when he heard a scream and decided to investigate, he was to say that he saw
four black guys and a white. When Omar refused they charged him with murder
along with Larry and Calvin. At their trials they all were convicted and were
sent off to jail. They wrote many appeals but none of them were ever accepted.
In the 1990’s Larry was hopeful that DNA would help exonerate them. Omar told
Larry that at his trial the prosecutor said that the blood type in the semen
matched everybody but himself. Larry then told Omar that the prosecutor said
that the blood type matched everybody but himself. Omar realized that this
meant that the prosecutor gave conflicting testimony. After getting all of them to sign a paper verifying
their blood types they still had a hard time getting the judge to review their
case. Omar eventually found a magazine profile about a lawyer named Kathleen
Zellner. Zellner was known for helping free wrongly convicted prisoners usually
by using DNA. She spent 800 hours off the clock and spent $50,000 of her own
money to ensure that their case would get back into court. Along the way she
had an independent lab test the men’s’ DNA which they found out did not match
any of the DNA found at the crime scene. The men were exonerated 15 years after
they had been wrongly convicted.
I am surprised at how out of hand
this case got, the police were desperate to convict someone for the atrocious
murder, and they didn’t care if the evidence matched up or not. They just
wanted to solve the case and put it behind them. I am happy that they finally
did get released but at the same time I am disappointed that they were convicted
in the first place. DNA testing in my opinion is something that should be
tested for every crime possible.
