DNA pro and con

Life is not fair. The guilty roam the country and commit crimes for which the innocent are jailed. The fallibility of the system is personified in Ray Krone of Arizona who was twice convicted of a murder, served 10 years on death row only to be freed, an innocent man, because further evidence refuted those hard won convictions.
Krone was the 100th death row prisoner to be freed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1973. The difficulty, at times, of gathering enough evidence to convict the guilty party is personified in Clyde Carl Wilkerson of Haskel. Wilkerson was arrested last week by the Arkansas State Police and the FBI for the 1965 murders of a 62-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman in El Cajon, Calif., according to a story in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Thanks to DNA research, history has been re-written for Krone and Wilkerson – both accused murders, one now declared innocent, the other charged after 40 years.
DNA, shorthand for a complicated scientific name for the genetic code found in every cell, dictates the color of the eyes, hair, height and gender of every individual far more decisively than any contacts, hair dye, costume or other means designed to disguise one’s birthright. Any time we touch another person, a surface area we may leave behind enough DNA for a positive identification.
According to the AP story, Ray Krone owes his freedom to the fact that whoever killed Kim Ancona (the woman he was alleged to have killed) drooled on her when he bit her and left tooth marks. An expert in tooth patterns testified at his trials that the bite pattern matched Krone’s – another expert, who was not heard at the trial, disagreed. No one contests the validity of the match of DNA in the saliva found on Ancona with Krone’s DNA which proved he could not have attacked and murdered Ancona.
Wilkerson owes his belated arrest to the El Cajon police review of old case files with an eye to using new technology such as DNA on the cases. The 1965 murder had DNA evidence from a rape kit. The FBI obtained a sample of Wilkerson’s DNA from his employer from the saliva on envelopes he sent. In 1965, Wilkerson had been a suspect in the case. However, at the time the police lacked sufficient evidence to convict him. Through the years since the 1965 murders he is alleged to have committed, Wilkerson has been arrested five other times and jailed at least three times.
Ironically, the same DNA test that freed Krone from death row, may be the test that puts alleged murderer Wilkerson there in his place.
Both men’s cases are horrifying. Due to lack of evidence, Wilkerson, considered as a potential suspect was not arrested and tried for murder, while Krone, who did not murder, was convicted, not once, but twice and sentenced to death.
It is horrifying to realize that innocent individuals can be convicted, condemned and waste years – maybe the rest of their life in jail – before the truth is known. It is equally horrifying that men such as accused murderer Wilkerson are free to commit subsequent assaults due to lack of evidence to convict.
We want the violent guilty off the streets – they threaten our sense of physical security.
We do not want the innocent behind bars – that threatens our faith in the system of justice.
Thanks to the millions of dollars invested in DNA research, a dozen alleged murderers have been released from death row and old, unsolved personal assault cases are being reviewed and hope is renewed that the perpetrators will be found.
While few of us understand the techniques used in DNA tests, the bit we do understand is enough to allow the innocent to sleep better nights – and may the guilty have DNA ridden nightmares forever.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)