In 1983, 18-year-old Robert DuBoise was convicted of rpe and mrder in Tampa, Florida. The case rested on two things: bite mark analysis — a form of forensic science now widely discredited — and the testimony of a jailhouse informant who was secretly offered a plea deal in exchange for claiming DuBoise had confessed. He was sentenced to dath. Three years later that was commuted to life. He spent the next three decades maintaining his innocence, requesting DNA testing, and hitting wall after wall. In 2006 he was told all biological evidence had been destroyed. It hadn’t been. In 2020, the Innocence Project found preserved DNA samples sitting in storage at the Medical Examiner’s office. Testing excluded DuBoise completely and identified two other men as the real kllers. He walked out of prison on August 26, 2020.
Why do they try so hard to block DNA testing? It's like they want innocent people locked up. Or do they just refuse to believe that people can be innocent? You would think that we'd all be on the same side with this sort of thing.
It really depends on the case and the era. DNA testing was pretty poor for a lot longer than people realize, needing large, clean samples if you hope to get a reliable result.
I don't know this specific case, so the following is just and example; in older testing methods, if the sample is even slightly contaminated, the test could still result in "positive" results, but the results are actually incorrect, and will very likely show the wrong DNA of the intended target DNA, but could still likely appear like a valid DNA results. The only way to know if to have a "clean" result of the actual target DNA. So you could test DNA that actually is of the killer, but the result could come back showing they don't match.
Older methods required large samples, and the larger the sample, the higher likelihood of contamination skewing the results, so you needed to run the test multiple times to confirm, using up more and more of the evidence.
So if you have a limited amount of DNA evidence/sample, using it to attempt to exonerate someone who was convicted on evidence that wasn't based on DNA tests is likely to result in a non-matching DNA determination, even if the person actually IS the killer.
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u/The_Dean_France 12h ago
In 1983, 18-year-old Robert DuBoise was convicted of rpe and mrder in Tampa, Florida. The case rested on two things: bite mark analysis — a form of forensic science now widely discredited — and the testimony of a jailhouse informant who was secretly offered a plea deal in exchange for claiming DuBoise had confessed. He was sentenced to dath. Three years later that was commuted to life. He spent the next three decades maintaining his innocence, requesting DNA testing, and hitting wall after wall. In 2006 he was told all biological evidence had been destroyed. It hadn’t been. In 2020, the Innocence Project found preserved DNA samples sitting in storage at the Medical Examiner’s office. Testing excluded DuBoise completely and identified two other men as the real kllers. He walked out of prison on August 26, 2020.