toledoblade.com --

COLUMBUS – For Jerome Campbell, it was the difference between life and death.

The death-row inmate convinced Ohio’s attorney general to pay for a DNA test he did not qualify for under a program that had never been used.

The results of that test helped convince Gov. Bob Taft to commute Campbell’s sentence to life in prison without parole last month just hours before he was to be executed.

Mr. Taft is expected to sign a bill into law this week that would take the small-scale program initiated in 2000 by then Attorney General Betty Montgomery beyond the walls of death row to inmates convicted of felonies.

The law would open a one-time, one-year window for those with at least a year left on their sentences to seek DNA tests at state expense.

“The beauty of the law is that, if another Jerome Campbell were to apply now, it would be the judge’s decision as to whether to accept or reject it, not the decision of an advocate,” said Greg Meyers, chief counsel of the Ohio Public Defender’s death penalty division.

“For Jerome Campbell, the attorney general was in the catbird seat,” he said. “They threw him a crumb and didn’t believe he deserved it, but it prevented Campbell’s execution. Ideally, the system shouldn’t involve the chicken going to the fox and asking for a favor.”

Evidence of deoxyribonucle-
ic acid, essentially a person’s genetic fingerprint, has been used in U.S. courts since 1986 and has become more common as science has enhanced its reliability.

“This creates a greater sense of trust in the results of the judicial system,” said Sen. David Goodman (R., Bexley), the bill’s sponsor. “We do not want, under any circumstances, to have innocent people incarcerated and certainly not to execute a person who is innocent.”

In 1999, two states, Illinois and New York, had DNA-testing laws. Four years later, more than 30 have them and a federal bill is under consideration. According to the Innocence Project, a New York-based program in which lawyers and law students pursue cases in which DNA might make a difference, 133 people nationwide have been exonerated because of such testing.

“DNA exonerations are the ones people have little problem with. It’s science,” said Aliza Kaplan, project deputy director. “The majority of our cases go back before DNA. It was not available to many of our clients 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Many of our cases involve mistaken identity and false confession, and there was no biological evidence introduced at all.”

A number of Innocence Projects have been founded at the state level, including one at the University of Cincinnati law school and the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing. Mich.

It remains to be seen how many inmates in Ohio’s prison system will seek DNA tests. Despite the recent high-profile release of a 42-year-old Massachusetts man who served 19 years for rapes he did not commit, the assumption is still that the vast majority of those in the system are indeed guilty and won’t seek DNA tests to confirm that.

As a result, no one expects the price tag to reach the worst-case scenario of more than $3.4 million with the tests costing $1,500 each. Current Attorney General Jim Petro said his office will absorb the one-time cost.

The Innocence Project, however, noted that the biggest battle has not been cost but rather getting access to DNA evidence that has been destroyed or misplaced.

“If the crime occurred 20 years ago and now they make a petition, that stuff is long gone,” said Mr. Petro. “They didn’t realize 15 years ago that this evidence might be as comprehensive and speedy as it has become.

“But, henceforth, everyone is put on notice that they shouldn’t let this time limit pass,” he said.

The one-year clock would begin ticking from the date the bill goes into effect at the end of October. The bill throws up a major barrier to someone who pleaded guilty by requiring the cooperation of the prosecutor.

But under a mechanism applying to those who have maintained their innocence, inmates would petition the courts for the test. If the prosecutor opposes the petition, a judge would make the decision based on whether the identity of the offender had been an issue at trial, whether DNA testing could have affected the trial’s outcome, and whether untainted DNA samples such as semen, hair, or saliva still exist.

Since Campbell, six other death-row inmates have undergone DNA testing under the attorney general’s program. The results did not exonerate the inmates.

In Campbell’s case, both the Ohio Parole Board and Mr. Taft remained convinced he stabbed John Henry Turner of Cincinnati to death in 1988. But they decided the jury might not have returned a death sentence if it knew blood on shoes displayed before the jury but never introduced as evidence was Campbell’s, not his elderly victim’s.

Under a strict reading of the death-row program guidelines, Ms. Montgomery’s office decided that, since the shoes were not introduced as evidence, DNA results would not have changed the outcome. But it granted the test anyway.

Permanent Link