Va. Governor Orders Broad Case Review
And yet there are still people who claim that only the guilty are found guilty by jury trials…

Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) announced the test results Wednesday. One of the defendants served 20 years in prison for a rape in Alexandria that the new testing shows he did not commit. The other man was released in 1992 after serving about 11 years for an assault in Norfolk. The governor did not reveal the names of the exonerated men because they had requested privacy. He said he would expedite their pardon requests.
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Virginia’s review marks one of the first instances in which a governor has ordered a broad examination of DNA cases and places the state at the forefront of a national debate over post-conviction DNA. Virginia has executed more people than any state except Texas since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. Like other states, its judicial system has been rocked by exonerations from DNA testing in several high-profile cases.

The latest results from Virginia are sure to provide ammunition to those who question the reliability of non-DNA evidence in criminal cases. Both of the recent cases had relied heavily on eyewitness testimony. The samples taken at the time were used to determine blood type, a far-less discriminating test than the DNA methods used today.

Although the Virginia men were not eligible for the death penalty for their convictions, their cases could help those who say greater use of DNA testing will detect the presence of possibly innocent inmates awaiting execution across the country.

“This is a 7 percent innocence rate — among people who never even asked for testing — that should give pause to people who think mistakes in our criminal justice system are flukes,” said Peter Neufeld, co-director of the New York-based Innocence Project. “This should be a beacon for other governors across the country to implement post-conviction DNA testing.”

The new testing conclusively proved that Virginia should not have jailed the Norfolk and Alexandria men and produced a “cold hit” linking someone else to the Alexandria rape. Alexandria Commonwealth’s Attorney S. Randolph Sengel said prosecutors would do “everything humanly possible” to bring the real criminal to trial.

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