A man who spent more than half his life in prison for crimes he didn’t commit was freed this week thanks to DNA evidence. Alan Crotzer, 45, was the fifth Florida inmate cleared by DNA in recent years.
Whether in real life or on TV dramas, DNA evidence has proven to be a neutral tool in determining guilt or innocence. It has the potential to establish a person’s innocence, as it did with Crotzer, and it can confirm guilt, as it did with Roger Keith Coleman, a Virginia man executed in 1992 for murder.
What we have learned as science becomes increasingly more sophisticated is that the main forms of evidence on which our justice system has relied, including eyewitness testimony and even forced confessions, are too often unreliable.
Crotzer had been sentenced to 130 years in prison for armed robbery and rape and served 24 years before DNA tests proved his innocence.
Before Virginia Gov. Mark Warner left office earlier this month, he ordered DNA testing in the case of Coleman, who was electrocuted in 1992 for killing his sister-in-law. Coleman had maintained his innocence to the end, but DNA capabilities not available earlier showed otherwise.
So far, none of the 1,005 people executed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 have been proven innocent using DNA. But that’s no cause for complacency. To the contrary, more than 100 people on death row have been exonerated of their crimes thanks to DNA testing.
Warner did the right thing in ordering the Coleman test and trying to determine if justice had been served.
DNA in Colorado has never been used to free anyone from prison, Department of Public safety spokesman Lance Clem said. But it has been used to exonerate plenty of suspects before they were convicted.
Under a new law in Colorado, every prisoner entering the state prison system is required to provide a DNA sample for the files. It has already proved useful in a case involving a Thornton man accused of rape, who has now been implicated in three other rapes dating back to 2002, said Clem.
The growing number of cases in which people have been exonerated with DNA should give prosecutors pause.
“Are you ready for what you waited so long to hear?” state Circuit Judge J. Rogers Padgett asked Crotzer on Monday. “Motion granted, you’re a free man.”
The prosecutor, Mike Sinacore, got it right when he said, “Trying to fix an error in the system is just as important as trying to convict someone who is guilty.”
