Lawyers for a man convicted in Lake County of rape and sentenced to 60 years in prison asked for a new trial Friday because DNA tests failed to link the defendant to the crime.
The petition, filed in Lake County Circuit Court by lawyers from the Innocence Project, including defense attorney Barry Scheck, also requests a court order requiring prosecutors to submit the DNA profile identified in the testing process to law enforcement DNA databases in an attempt to identify the source.
Michael Mermel, chief of the felony trial division of the Lake County state’s attorney’s office, said Friday that they would not oppose the request to submit the DNA profile to the databases.
Mermel said his office would analyze the DNA test results, which appear to contradict what he said is “substantial circumstantial non-DNA evidence” that implicates Bennie Starks in the crime.
Starks, 42, of Waukegan was convicted of the Jan. 18, 1986, sexual assault of a 69-year-old woman who left her apartment to take a walk around 8:30 p.m.
She told police that a man grabbed her and began punching her, dragged her into a nearby ravine where he bit her on the shoulder and raped her.
The day after the attack, police recovered a coat, gloves, a scarf, underwear, a watch and some keys in the ravine. A dry cleaning tag in the coat led authorities to Starks, who said he had been in a tavern on the night of the attack. Starks said two men robbed him as he left the tavern and took some of his belongings. Police said Starks had scratch marks on his wrist, his back and buttocks.
At trial, a crime laboratory analyst testified that blood tests could not exclude Starks as the source of semen on the underwear and that a hair found on a scarf in the ravine “could have come” from Starks. A dental expert said Starks was responsible for the bite mark on the victim.
“Prosecutors can’t have it both ways,” Scheck said Friday. “They (prosecutors) chose to put these sperm samples in front of the jury. Bennie Starks ought to have a new trial.”
