Guilt tip: DNA testing and justice.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Citings

THE GUILT OR innocence of a man executed for murder is less important than adhering to legal niceties, the Virginia Supreme Court declared in late October. The court refused to use modern, highly accurate DNA testing in the case of Roger Keith Coleman, a man executed in 1992 by the Commonwealth of Virginia for the 1981 rape and murder of his sister-in-law Wanda McCoy.

The physical evidence, including semen samples, pointed strongly to Coleman's guilt. But he staunchly denied that he had murdered McCoy even as he went to his death.

The biological evidence in the Coleman case has been stored at a California testing lab for more than a decade. A group of newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, sought legal permission to have those samples tested again using today's more accurate DNA techniques. Virginia officials, including two attorneys general, fiercely resisted the request, maintaining that criminal proceedings and convictions must have judicial finality.

Much more was at stake than Coleman's guilt or innocence. Death penalty opponents have yet to find a modern U.S. case in which a demonstrably innocent person has been wrongfully executed. They believe that even one such case would dramatically reduce the American public's consistent support for the death penalty and eventually lead to its abolition. Death penalty proponents...