Excerpt from the NBCnews.com
Nearly a decade into his life sentence for murder, Lydell Grant was escorted out of a Texas prison in November with his hands held high, free on bail, all thanks to DNA re-examined by a software program.
“The last nine years, man, I felt like an animal in a cage,” Grant, embracing his mother and brother, told the crush of reporters awaiting him in Houston. “Especially knowing that I didn’t do it.”
Now, Grant, 42, is on a fast track to exoneration after a judge recommended in December that Texas’ highest criminal court vacate his conviction. His attorneys are hopeful a ruling is made in the coming weeks.
If probabilistic genotyping software is being used in trials, defendants should have every opportunity to know how the algorithm came to its conclusion to mount a capable defense, said DNA expert Dan Krane, the interim dean of Wright State University’s Lake Campus in Ohio.
“There’s a conflict between a defendant’s constitutional right to confront the witnesses versus an inventor’s right to protect the intellectual property associated with their invention,” Krane said.
For Grant to get to here hinged on two prongs: the DNA evidence, which was reanalyzed through an emerging software that has also come under scrutiny, and an unprecedented decision to use the findings to conduct an FBI criminal database search that was initiated by a third party not part of the initial investigation. That led to the discovery of a new suspect, who has been charged after police said he confessed.
The search process used in Grant’s case has enormous potential to solve cold cases or re-evaluate other convictions that could pave the way for more exonerations nationwide, forensic scientists say.
“There’s probably 5,000 or 6,000 innocent people in Texas prisons alone,” said lawyer Mike Ware, executive director of the Innocence Project of Texas, which is representing Grant. “How many of them could benefit from such a reanalysis of DNA that was used to convict them? I don’t really know, but this is a historic case that could open the door for those who thought it was shut forever.”
