On November 18, a Tennessee criminal courts judge is expected to rule on the posthumous use of DNA testing on evidence that could exonerate Sedley Alley, a man who was denied DNA testing and was executed by the state of Tennessee in 2006. Two days later, on November 20, Texas is expected to execute Rodney Reed, another man hoping for DNA testing of evidence related to his case.
Sedley Alley
In 1985 Alley was arrested for the rape and murder of Lance Corporal Suzanne Collins. In 1987 a jury took less than three hours to convict him and sentence him to death.
Initially Alley denied involvement, but he ended up giving a confession. He confessed to drinking heavily on the night of the murder, accidentally hitting Collins with his car, and trying to help her while holding a screwdriver, which she fell on. However, none of these details from his confession matched details from the autopsy and crime scene. As for the details that did match, interrogators later admitted that they suggested answers to their questions during Alley’s interrogation. In 2004 Alley recanted his confession, saying it was coerced.
Physical evidence also failed to implicate Alley. According to the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal organization that works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, tire tracks from Alley’s car did not match tracks from the crime scene, nor did the shoe prints from the scene match his. A key witness described the likely perpetrator as having a dark complexion, short dark hair, and a height between 5’6” and 5’8.” Alley was 6’4” with long red hair and a light complexion.
Several weeks before Alley’s execution, his lawyers requested that evidence be tested for DNA. The Tennessee Parole Board agreed and recommended that then-Governor Phil Bredesen halt Alley’s execution until the evidence could be analysed. Although Bredesen had to power to do this, he deferred to the Tennessee courts. There, prosecutors argued that the request for testing was merely an attempt to delay execution and that finding someone else’s DNA would not be enough to exonerate Alley. The court denied the request based on a now-reversed interpretation of the Post-Conviction DNA Analysis Act of 2001.
On June 28, 2006, Alley was executed by the State of Tennessee.
In 2011, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that Alley did have a right to post-conviction DNA testing.
Years later, his daughter still wants closure. In April she filed a petition to the Criminal Court of Shelby County, TN to run DNA testing on the evidence that is still in its possession. Tennessee has responded to her petition arguing that the request for DNA analysis should be denied because the Post-Conviction DNA Analysis Act only allows the convicted person to petition, so a relative does not qualify.
Supporters of the death penalty like to argue that there are no confirmed cases of the US executing an innocent person, especially in modern times. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in 2006, “If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby… [As] far as anyone can determine (and many are looking), none of the cases included in the .027% error rate for American verdicts involved a capital defendant erroneously executed.”
This argument makes sense, but it falls short without the possibility of someone being exonerated after execution. If only the convicted person himself has the right to DNA testing, then once he is executed, his guilt or innocence can never be proven with a DNA analysis.
On November 18, a Tennessee judge is expected to rule on Alley’s daughter’s petition for DNA testing.
As Kate Prince wrote on the Tennessee Bar Association website, “If testing were to clear Alley of the crime, it would mark the first time that DNA testing has exonerated a person posthumously in the United States.”
Rodney Reed
In a racially-charged 1996 case, Rodney Reed, an African American man, was convicted of raping and murdering Stacey Stites, a white woman. Reed was given the death penalty by an all-white jury.
The only evidence connecting Reed to the crime was the presence of three of his sperm cells in Stites’ body. Reed has maintained since his arrest that this was because he and Stites were having a consensual affair. Prosecutors dismissed this claim, and they largely relied on forensic testimony to establish their timeline that Reed raped Stites right before he killed her.
However, by 2017, those original expert testimonies had all been either recanted or disproven. At least four well-respected forensic pathologists believe it is medically and scientifically impossible that Reed is guilty.
No witnesses came forward about their knowledge of Reed and Stites’ affair during the initial trial. However, since Reed’s conviction, multiple people have said they knew about the consensual relationship. As of October 25, three witnesses have also come forward with new testimony against Jimmy Fennell, the original suspect in the case.
Fennell is an ex-police officer who was engaged to Stites at the time of her murder. According to witnesses, he threatened to kill Stites if she ever cheated on him, and he used racial slurs when he discovered his fiance was having an affair with a black man. He gave contradicory accounts of where he was on the night of the murder. When asked to explain this to the court, he invoked his right to remain silent.
Fennell has a history of violence against women; since Reed’s conviction, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for kidnapping and assaulting a woman while he was on-duty as a police officer.
Given the presence of another potential suspect in the case, it is shocking that the murder weapon and other pieces collected from the crime scene were not tested for DNA during the initial trial. They still have not been tested.
Over the past five years, Reed’s lawyers have filed repeated requests for DNA testing, all of which have been denied. In August they filed a federal lawsuit on Reed’s behalf, and they have also asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott to grant a 30-day reprieve on the execution.
Reed is scheduled to be executed on November 20.
DNA Testing in Criminal Cases
The first time DNA testing was used to convict a criminal in the US was in 1987, the same year Alley was convicted of rape and first-degree murder. Two years later, DNA testing was used for the first time in an exoneration. For trials around this time and for several years following, DNA testing was not yet a standard, nor was it as reliable as it is today.
Now, it is widely accepted that, while DNA testing alone may not be enough to convict someone, it is the most objective and unquestionable way to determine the innocence or guilt of a suspect. TIME reports, “Forensic testing can determine if distinctive patterns in the genetic material found at a crime scene match the DNA in a potential perpetrator with better than 99% accuracy.”
Cost and length of time to run the tests continue to drop while accuracy rises. Authorities are increasingly able to analyse smaller and smaller DNA samples; now tests can be run on a few skin cells collected from an object that a perpetrator only briefly touched. National DNA databases are also growing rapidly. In 2009, the FBI’s CODIS database of registered offenders had slightly over 5 million profiles; it has 13.9 million as of August.
Testing allows DNA collected from crime scene evidence to be compared to the suspect’s DNA as well as to the nearly 14 million DNA samples in the CODIS database.
367 people have been exonerated using DNA testing in the United States. Of these, 21 have been exonerated from death row.
Close to home
These cases may seem distant and irrelevant to our small college on Lookout Mountain, but they have important implications for criminal justice locally. Georgia is one of the 29 states where the death penalty is legal. On October 30, Georgia was planning to execute Ray Jefferson Cromartie after denying his appeals for DNA testing of evidence. Hours before Cromartie was scheduled to die, the Georgia Supreme Court issued an indefinite halt on his execution order. Cromartie maintains his innocence.
Cromartie is on death row for the 1994 murder of a convenience store clerk. Cromartrie and two others were involved in a robbery at the convenience store where the clerk worked. One of the robbers shot the clerk, but surveillance footage was not clear enough to determine who. Cromartie’s lawyers argue that one of the other men shot the victim, and that Cromartie’s conviction relied heavily on the testimonies of witnesses who had strong motivation to lie or who have since recanted.
The victim’s daughter has repeatedly supported Cromartie’s petition for DNA testing. In a letter to state lawyers, she wrote, "My father's death was senseless. Executing another man would also be senseless, especially if he may not have shot my father."