And did a killer walk away?
Almost every good murder mystery revolves around a single question: Whodunit? In real life, since its advent in the late 1980s, DNA analysis has helped investigators answer this question in many cases. Mystery solved. But in other cases, doubts linger because DNA testing was not conducted thoroughly or even at all. When the evidence from a crime scene sits untested on a shelf, do we still care to know what it could tell us, no matter what? |
I've been interested in these questions since I went to law school in the late 1990s and took a course on capital punishment with Stephen Bright, the former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights. In class, we talked about Herrera v. Collins, a 1993 Supreme Court case in which Herrera's lawyers tried to save him from execution by showing that they had newly discovered evidence of his innocence. By a vote of 6 to 3, the justices denied the petition. "At some point in time, the State's interest in finality must outweigh the prisoner's interest in yet another round of litigation," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her concurring opinion. |
That dry language has been the underpinning of many cases in which courts have let people go to their deaths with doubts about "whodunit" unresolved. As O'Connor said in 2001 to a group of lawyers in Minnesota, "If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed." |
Wrongful execution is one of the ultimate dangers inherent in government power. And yet the state's drive toward finality often remains overriding. Last week, I listened to the state of Tennessee oppose DNA testing in a petition brought by the estate of Sedley Alley. Alley can no longer ask for testing himself because he was executed 15 years ago for a murder that took place in 1985. But the "whodunit" question in the case remains open. Evidence from the crime scene has never been analyzed for DNA. And so Alley's daughter, April, has gone to court, in his shoes, to ask for testing. |
If DNA exonerates Sedley Alley, it will be the first time someone was definitely proved to have been wrongly put to death. His daughter is taking a risk. It could turn out, after all this time, that it's her father's DNA on that clothing. But it strikes me that April Alley wants to solve the mystery once and for all — while the state would rather settle for uncertainty. |
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