Human Rights Violations : DNA Clears a Man of Rape After 15 Years in Prison

OKLAHOMA CITY When Jeffrey Pierce was convicted of rape in 1986, he lost his freedom and his family. He and his wife decided to divorce and she left Oklahoma to raise their twin infant sons as if he did not exist. To survive in prison, he learned to do two things - to mind his own business and to lift weights.

But Monday, after maintaining his innocence throughout the 15 years he spent behind bars, Mr. Pierce was freed because DNA testing refuted the crucial testimony against him from an Oklahoma City police chemist long accused of shoddy work and now the focus of one of the most wide-ranging investigations into a police laboratory.

"The citizens of Oklahoma County have been duped," Mr. Pierce said outside Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington, Oklahoma, after a state judge vacated his conviction and 65-year sentence. "The juries have been lied to for the last 20 years. There are going to be a lot more victims."

Mr. Pierce left the prison Monday with his mother and his brother, Gary, who fought for years to overturn the conviction. Mr. Pierce will soon meet the two sons, now 15, whom he has only seen through photographs since they were infants.

The longstanding questions about the conviction of Mr. Pierce, a landscaper who happened to be near the scene of the rape, helped set in motion the inquiry into the chemist, Joyce Gilchrist. An FBI report found an array of errors in a sampling of her cases, including Mr. Pierce's. Last week, the federal Justice Department began an investigation while Governor Frank Keating of Oklahoma ordered a review into every felony conviction linked to Ms. Gilchrist to make certain that no one else has been wrongly convicted.

Among those hundreds of cases are 11 in which the defendant was executed and 12 in which the defendant is on death row. Mr. Keating has expressed confidence that none of the people who were executed were innocent.

The investigations into Ms. Gilchrist, who analyzed forensic evidence like blood, hair and semen from 1980 until she was promoted in 1994 to a supervisory position, come as other police laboratory scientists are under scrutiny in Illinois, West Virginia and Florida. But the scope of the investigation into Ms. Gilchrist could be unparalleled. "The truth is finally being known," said Mr. Pierce's lawyer, David Autry. "Nobody has listened to us for 15 years and now science has advanced enough to prove what we've known all along: that Jeff Pierce is innocent."
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Mr. Pierce's trial came not long before Ms. Gilchrist's work began coming under criticism from her peers, defense lawyers and judges. She was reprimanded by one professional organization and expelled from another.

Despite the criticism, local police officials and prosecutors never scrutinized her work.

For Mr. Pierce, his conviction collapsed the framework of his life. His wife, now Kathy Wahl, had recently given birth to twin sons, but after a few painful prison visits, the couple decided to divorce.
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The key bread in Mr. Pierce's case came late last year when, under a new state law, the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System won approval to submit the forensic evidence in the case for independent DNA testing, something Mr. Pierce's lawyers had sought for years.

Last month, the preliminary results showed that Mr. Pierce was not the rapist. And an FBI analysis of the hair samples rebutted Ms. Gilchrist's original hair testimony.

Gary Pierce, who has blamed his brother's travails not only Ms. Gilchrist, but also on the office of Oklahoma County District Attorney Robert Macy, says he hopes that the entire criminal justice system in Oklahoma City is scrutinized as a result of the controversy. Officials in Mr. Macy's office have defended the actions of prosecutors and denied accusations that they encouraged Ms. Gilchrist to sharpen her testimony to win convictions. "Everybody asks me, 'Why did they keep her?'" Gary Pierce said. "She got convictions. They didn't care about the methods she used."

The plans are not complete, but Ms. Wahl said her sons would meet their father later this week. Three weeks ago, after she learned that the preliminary DNA report had proved Mr. Pierce's innocence, she told her sons about their father. Everyone is now nervous but excited about the meeting, she said.

"They are excited but sad to think this could have happened to Jeff and them," she said. "They've been robbed for 15 years of a wonderful person."
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Amazon.com:
The Innocence Project is a pro bono civil rights organization that helps innocent people who have been unjustly imprisoned win their freedom through DNA testing. Run by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld (known for their roles in the O.J. Simpson murder trial), the project has thus far managed to free 43 wrongly convicted people and has taken on the cases of over 200 more. In Actual Innocence, Scheck, Neufeld, and Pulitzer-winning columnist Jim Dwyer tell the stories of 10 of the men they have helped. How did these men wind up in prison--some on death row--for rapes and murders they didn't commit? The causes range from mistaken identification by the victims to sloppy police work--and, in some cases, outright dereliction of duty or fabrication of evidence. Far too often, cops lock on to their suspect early and decide that their instincts can't possibly be wrong--an attitude that can persist even after the falsely accused has been exonerated. ''If he is innocent,'' says one investigator of a man who spent seven years in prison, ''I wish him a good life, but I will have no remorse for him. I have no remorse for anyone that I have ever arrested.''
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George F. Will, Washington Post, April 6, 2000:
It should change the argument about capital punishment...You will not soon read a more frightening book... Heartbreaking and infuriating.
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