Americans are being immersed in the pros and cons of DNA testing, and possibly overzealous police, via the O.J. Simpson murder case.
But you can get a thorough look at a procedure that promised to revolutionize forensic testing and at suspect law enforcers via August Glamour’s aptly titled “Two Rapes, Three Victims.”
It’s the unseemly saga of two women who were raped in 1987 during separate incidents at a mall in Huntington, W.Va., and the cemetery worker convicted of the rapes.
At the core is DNA testing and results that can be so inherently “ambiguous that they can be more misleading than valuable. And since the labs that do the testing are almost completely unregulated, it is feared that there are serious quality-control problems-possibly leading to incorrect results that use up large amounts of irreplaceable forensic evidence.”
In the West Virginia case, cemetery worker Glen Woodall sought to have DNA testing of some of the semen-stained evidence. But he was turned down by a judge who agreed with prosecutors that DNA testing was too experimental.
The victims, an assistant manager at a Limited clothing shop and a car dealership employee, never identified Woodall but said he was of the same height and build as the attacker. Woodall’s name had remained on a list of possible sex offenders even though a 1982 charge of sexual assault brought by a woman with a history of mental troubles was dropped.
Woodall was convicted of the rapes, largely because his blood type matched the rapist’s, prompting friends to raise $10,000 to go to a hotshot law firm that would try to get DNA testing brought into play.
The firm persuaded the state Supreme Court to allow consideration of such testing. But initial results were inconclusive. His lawyer then discovered another, then-novel type of DNA procedure that needed far less DNA to get results, and persuaded the same Supreme Court to let him try it.
That procedure, the polymerase chain reaction dotblot, or PCR, is being used in the Simpson case. It concluded that Woodall could not be the rapist, helped change local public opinion toward him, and led to an order for a new trial.
But before such a trial was to start, Woodall’s defense lawyer uncovered serious questions about non-DNA evidence in the case. Notably, the state police’s key forensic expert not only vastly overstated the strength of the evidence in Woodall’s case, but apparently had done so often. Hundreds of cases in West Virginia and Texas, where he once worked, may now be reopened.
While this was happening, the prosecutors did new DNA testing of their own and also concluded that Woodall couldn’t be the rapist. After he’d spent five years in jail, they dismissed the charges.
The price of justice? One of the rape victims developed an addiction to prescription drugs, her marriage collapsed and she spent time in a psychiatric hospital. The other woman had a less traumatic response, but felt compelled to leave the area.
Woodall got a $1 million settlement from the state, but still feels adrift. As the beleaguered former assistant store manager concedes, the legal system messed up bigtime. Nobody came away satisfied.
