Forensic DNA evidence clears man after 24 years

DNA testing has been a major factor in changing the criminal justice system in the US. It has provided scientific proof that the system convicts and sentences innocent people - and that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events. Most importantly, DNA testing has opened a window into wrongful convictions so that the causes can be studied and remedies that may minimise the chances that more innocent people are convicted are formulated.

A Texan court has vacated the conviction and freed David Wiggins based on new DNA evidence proving him innocent of a 1988 sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl. Wiggins walked out of the Tarrant County Court House after serving 24 years for a crime he always maintained he didn’t commit.

At around 10.15 am on 21 July 1988, a 14-year-old girl in the Meadows of Candleridge neighbourhood in Texas was at home alone during summer vacation. After she opened the back door to let her dog outside, an unknown male intruder knocked her to the floor. The perpetrator then turned the victim onto her back and put a towel over her face and his hand over her mouth while he proceeded to sexually assault and rape her.

Throughout the encounter, the victim had an opportunity to view the perpetrator’s face at most three times for somewhere between 10 and 30 seconds each time. The victim called 911 just a few minutes after the perpetrator left her house. When the police arrived, she gave a general description of her attacker as a white male who had very foul-smelling body odour. Soon after the police arrived, she was taken by ambulance to the John Peter Smith Hospital where doctors collected a rape kit. Although fluid was collected from the victim, the Fort Worth Police Department Crime Laboratory did not conduct serological or DNA testing on the evidence because they concluded that the quantity of fluid collected was insufficient for the early forms of DNA technology that existed in the late 1980s.

Two days after the assault, the victim was shown a photo array that included a photo of David Wiggins. Next to his photograph, she wrote, “looks familiar”. She also noted that unlike the photograph of Wiggins, she recalled that the perpetrator’s “hair was combed” and “he looked neater”.

Wiggins was arrested on 23 July as a passenger in a stolen car. He was placed in a live line-up on 24 July and was selected by the victim; Wiggins was the only person in the line-up whose photograph was in the array shown to the victim previously. The victim also identified him as her attacker at trial. The prosecution produced no physical evidence at the trial connecting Wiggins with the crime. The only evidence other than the victim’s identification was the testimony of the driver of the stolen car and another witness who claimed that Wiggins had told them that he had approached a house to burglarise it, but when he entered the house he saw a girl and ran away.

“The identification procedure used illustrates what the scientists who have studied misidentification refer to as ‘mug shot’ commitment,” said Nina Morrison, Senior Staff Attorney with the Innocence Project. “When the victim viewed the photo array, she was not certain about the identification, but having seen the photo influenced her subsequent identifications, each time making her more confident that she picked the right person.”

Prior to trial, Wiggins’ court-appointed attorney did not file any motions challenging the line-up procedures, nor did he seek any expert assistance to explain to the jury why the victim might have misidentified him. Wiggins himself filed a pro se, handwritten motion from gaol to suppress the victim’s identification, but his attorney never followed up on the motion and the court never held a hearing on the issue before or during the trial.

Wiggins has always maintained his innocence of the crime. Before his trial, he filed a pro se motion seeking DNA testing that was denied. During the trial, his attorney argued that Wiggins was misidentified and that the other two witnesses were motivated to lie. Among other incentives, both were on probation and were asked to testify by the prosecution. The jury rejected these arguments and convicted Wiggins on 9 August 1989 of sexual assault of a child. He was sentenced to life in prison.

After his conviction, Wiggins filed multiple unsuccessful pro se requests for DNA testing. He eventually sought the help of the Innocence Project, which accepted his case in 2007. With the cooperation of the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, the clothing that the victim was wearing during the crime was sent to a lab for DNA testing, which found sperm on the victim’s shorts (which she put on immediately after the assault) that does not match Wiggins. Since the victim had no prior sexual history, which was confirmed by the doctors who examined her, the Tarrant County prosecutor readily agreed that Wiggins was wrongly convicted.

“Thanks at least in part to the lessons learned through the nearly 300 DNA exonerations, the criminal justice system in Texas has made significant improvements to its line-up procedures since Mr Wiggins was arrested in 1989,” said Morrison.

The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal clinic affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and created by Barry C Scheck and Peter J Neufeld in 1992. The project is a national litigation and public policy organisation dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. As a clinic, law students handle case work while supervised by a team of attorneys and clinic staff.