By Michael D. Shear and Jamie Stockwell
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 16, 2005; B08
RICHMOND, Dec. 15 -- Virginia graduate students will soon begin sifting through thousands of decades-old crime files in a months-long, $1.4 million effort by state officials to see whether DNA testing will exonerate any more defendants who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned decades ago.
The unprecedented review of 660 boxes of criminal case files was prompted by the revelation Wednesday that limited biological testing of newly found evidence had revealed that two men who had been imprisoned for years were innocent. In the past three years, the files have exonerated five men who served a combined 91 years in prison.
Gov. Mark R. Warner (D), who ordered the sweeping review, will include the money to pay for it in his final budget. Senior lawmakers said they expected no opposition to the request for funds when the General Assembly convenes next month.
"I don't care if it costs $10 million," said state Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle (R-Virginia Beach), who chairs the Senate Courts of Justice Committee and is a former police officer. "Whatever it costs. There's an unacceptable error rate that demands we review all these cases."
Advocates of DNA testing immediately seized on the Virginia results as further proof that the judicial system in the United States relies too heavily on eyewitness evidence that is often wrong.
William S. Sessions, FBI director from 1987 to 1993, said the Virginia results should compel governors in other states to make DNA testing broadly available to inmates before and after conviction.
"All across the United States . . . they should cough up those evidence lockers, clean them out, test them," Sessions said. "So it costs $1,000. So what? If in fact DNA at any time can establish that the person charged is not the correct person, we should pay attention to it."
But other lawyers were not so sure that a wholesale review of long-settled cases is in order.
"Do mistakes get made from eyewitness cases? Yeah. But does that mean you go back and reexamine every case? I don't know," said James R. Wooley, a former prosecutor who served on a national panel on DNA testing and testified before Congress. "Everything that you would reexamine has its own facts and its own circumstances."
Circumstances surrounding the two Virginia men who were exonerated Wednesday began emerging Thursday.
Willie Davidson was released from prison in 1992, after serving 12 years, said his attorney, James O. Broccoletti of Norfolk, and had maintained his innocence all along.
Davidson, 49, was convicted by a judge of raping a 66-year-old widow in her Norfolk home on Thanksgiving Day in 1980. The woman identified Davidson as her attacker. He was also convicted in a bench trial of statutory robbery and two counts of sodomy and was sentenced to four 20-year terms, to be served concurrently.
Since his release, Davidson, who declined through his attorney to be interviewed, has struggled to make a decent living. He lost job and housing opportunities because of his conviction, Broccoletti said.
"The way he sees it, he spent 12 years in hell and the last 13 years in purgatory," Broccoletti said in a telephone interview.
Virginia officials have declined to identify the man, now 50, who was cleared Wednesday of a rape in Alexandria.
The rape occurred about 5:45 a.m. Dec. 30, 1984. A 37-year-old woman was dragged from a bus stop at West Glebe Road and Executive Avenue. Her screams awoke neighbors, one of whom testified that he saw a man beat and choke the woman as she lay on the ground.
In Richmond, a scientist at the state Department of Forensic Science has begun working through the first 15 boxes, each containing about 250 case files from the early 1970s, said Paul B. Ferrara, the department director.
Over the holidays, graduate students from Virginia Commonwealth University will help sort through the files to determine which ones are appropriate for biological testing.
In cases where samples are too degraded to test, authorities eventually will search courthouses to see whether evidence from a trial has been preserved. In most older cases, evidence was destroyed after a defendant's appeals were exhausted, but not always, Ferrara said. He said the goal would be to try to come to some conclusion on all the cases.
Officials expect that DNA from about 300 cases eventually will be tested.
"I think it's clear there are going to be more exonerations," Ferrara said.
Stockwell reported from Alexandria. Staff writer Maria Glod contributed to this report.
