Not to preach to the choir, but this is another reminder that eyewitness testimony is one of the weakest forms of evidence, especially when that eyewitness was under the stress of being the actual victim at the time of the alleged crime. Every state of which I’m aware allows for felony convictions to be based on the identification testimony of just one witness, and while I don’t feel the need to engage in the hypothetical battle of when that could be appropriate, from a practical standpoint, I think jurors ought to be trained to acquit in all cases in which there is a single-witness identification by the victim. This does, in fact, change the evidentiary game in sex crimes, and while I don’t want to make the lives of rape victims any harder, I want to send innocent men to jail even less.

Sure, if they find a match for another individual, that’s good evidence that someone else committed the crime. However, when you exclude someone because “…the DNA obtained from the scene did not match the suspect…”, things are not anywhere nearly as clear-cut.

There’s a phenomena known as genetic chimerism, where an individual may have more than one cell line making up their body’s tissues. We really don’t know how prevalent this phenomenal is, or whether or not we can really rely on genetic sampling taken from buccal swabs, when the evidence we’re looking at is seminal fluid.

Say that you test your suspect, and turn up a different genetic profile than the fluids left on your victim. All the other evidence points at him, but the DNA exonerates him. Unknown to you, however, is that your suspect is a genetic chimera, and his germ cells came from a different cell line than the tissues making up his cheeks… Guess what? You just exonerated a guilty man.

DNA testing needs to be looked at a lot more carefully than it is. I’d be very cautious about these “miracle exonerations” until we’re actually matching tissue types to tissue types. Show me that the suspect’s seminal fluids don’t match, when the evidence is left-behind seminal fluids, and I’d be a lot more trusting when it comes to exonerating him. Even then, there’s some very scarily poor work being done by the forensics people in these things.

Time to change Virginia law in this regard.

That’s about all I can say about that. I’m just totally gobsmacked stupid wordless over the concept of what it would even be like to be released after 26, 27 years in prison for a crime you didn’t commit. 60% of your life to date spent behind bars, wrongfully. What the hell would you even do after that?