DNA Exoneration

4 Pages 895 Words

Nelson Pickering
Exoneration by DNA

Exoneration because of DNA evidence is one of the greatest projects philanthropists in America have ever embarked on. These great people have started using science to keep innocent people out of jail and to exonerate those who have been wrongfully put away. Through the sciences of RFLP typing and PCR we will now be able to free most innocent men in prison.
George Dotson was the first man, who by this exciting new process received a full pardon from the state of Illinois. Here is his sad story. Cathleen Crowell was a sixteen year old Chicago resident. On the night of July 9, 1977 she tearfully confronted an officer of the law to try to tell him this fabricated story of how three men bound and gagged her and then one of the men proceeded to rape her. She also told police that the man, who raped her, also scratched words onto her stomach with a broken beer bottle.
She went to the police station to help the sketch artist come up with a composite of the man she remembered which resulted in a picture of a stringy, young white male. She identified Dotson from a sketchbook police later showed her. Later that day the police picked up Dotson from his upper-class house and took him to the station where Cathleen identified him, even though she told police her assailant had no facial hair and Dotson had a moustache which must have taken months to grow. There were many blunders during this trial but the huge disappointment to me was when they found him guilty without a reasonable doubt. He was sentenced to twenty-five to fifty years for Rape and another twenty-five to fifty years for Kidnapping. He sat in jail for ten years before his appeals. Cathleen finally admitted to a reverend in 1985 that she had fabricated the whole story because she was afraid a previous boyfriend might have gotten her pregnant the prior night. “In mid-August, 1988 Edward Blake, the pioneer of PCR typing, told the D...