The Right to DNA Evidence

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Alaska is one of six states that do not have laws giving prisoners’ access to DNA evidence that could establish their innocence. The Supreme Court hears arguments on Monday in a case brought by an inmate who argues that he has a constitutional right to test crime-scene DNA that could help him overturn his rape conviction. A federal appeals court ruled in his favor. The Supreme Court should affirm that ruling.

In 1993, an Anchorage prostitute was attacked by two men and raped. A man named Dexter Jackson confessed and named William Osborne as the second attacker. Mr. Osborne, who had no criminal record and was serving in the military, was convicted, based partly on a DNA test of biological material from a condom recovered at the scene. The state used an old method, known as DQ-alpha testing, that could not identify the person to whom the DNA belonged with great specificity.

Mr. Osborne is now seeking to do an STR test, a more precise, cutting-edge form of DNA testing, on the same material. If he is innocent, the STR test could prove it definitively. But the Alaska state courts rejected Mr. Osborne’s request. According to his lawyers, Alaska is the only one of the six states without DNA testing laws that has never conducted a postconviction DNA test, either by court order or by consent of the state.

Mr. Osborne went to federal court, where he argued that Alaska’s refusal to allow him to test the material deprived him of his 14th Amendment due process rights. He also argued that the results of the STR test could be run through an F.B.I. database to identify the person who actually committed the crime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/opinion/02mon2.html?th&emc=th