The nationally known Innocence Project has taken up the case of convicted Manatee County rapist Derrick Williams. They were banking on the importance of a single strand of hair and hoping that it was the key to reversing Williams’ conviction.

The Innocence Project takes on old criminal cases and attempts to navigate through the legal system to allow for up-to-date DNA technology to be utilized to, hopefully exonerate the defendant. State law allows defendants to ask for any DNA evidence that might exonerate them be tested.

In the Williams case, they asked the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office to allow it to run DNA tests on the hair found at the scene of the 1992 rape for which Williams was convicted. Unfortunately, they were advised that the hair was destroyed in 2003 along with evidence in about 3,600 other Manatee County criminal cases after a water leak flooded an evidence storage facility in a vault at a former bank building.

The evidence was then incinerated but the local legal community was unaware of the destruction until now. The sheriff’s office says all the lost evidence related to cases that had already gone through the legal system.

Williams is serving a life sentence but has always maintained his innocence. He offered to give blood and saliva samples to compare with any semen found in the case but none was found. DNA testing at the time was not sophisticated enough to use pubic hair found at the scene. The jury reached its verdict based solely on witness testimony and no biological evidence.

The Innocence Project only takes cases where biological evidence from the crime was not tested for DNA at the time, but that if it were tested now, could demonstrate that someone else committed the crime. Although the now-lost hair would have been the best and easiest sample to test, the Innocence Project attorneys now hope to get DNA from some of the other evidence in the case.

Criminal defense attorneys in Manatee County now intend to get a list of the cases in which evidence was destroyed and analyze that information to determine if any cases other than Williams’s case could be affected. Even the simple fact that evidence was damaged and destroyed could become an appellate issue in some cases.

Violent Crimes

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 8:54 am and is filed under Florida Criminal Law News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.