Response To A DNA Test That Backfired
His legal team, led by law professor David Siegel, a founding member of the New England Innocence Project, then sought and found the physical evidence from the crime and in 1999 McDermott, Will & Emery managing partner Robert Cordy, now a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, wrote to the Worcester District Attorney in an attempt to establish a protocol for DNA testing. The district attorney, John Conte, a former State Senator appointed by Governor Michael Dukakis in 1976 to finish an unexpired term, rebuffed Cordy, in turn intimating that LaGuer's team may have tampered with the evidence. After more than two years of contentious and costly litigation a DNA test revealed a trace amount of LaGuer's genetic material in the evidence. Several forensic DNA experts, including Applied DNA Resources principal Theodore Kessis, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Associate Provost Lawrence Kobilinsky and Harvard University geneticist Daniel Hartl, questioned the DNA test, and called for an investigation into its validity.
LaGuer continued to maintain his innocence and attracted the pro bono services of another high powered international law firm, Goodwin Procter, where James C. Rehnquist, a partner at the firm and son of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, took over LaGuer's case. In February 2004 Rehnquist filed a motion for a new trial in Worcester, Massachusetts Superior Court seeking a new trial on the basis of a Massachusetts State Police report generated the day LaGuer was arrested showing that four fingerprints found on the base of the trimline telephone, the cord of which was used to bind the victim's wrists, did not match the defendant's. This revelation prompted concern from several law makers, including State Senator Jarrett Barrios, who made a written inquiry to the State Police crime lab. Rehnquist's position that the suppression of potentially exculpatory evidence (revealed in November 2001, almost 18 years after the trial) constituted a violation of LaGuer's right to a fair trial, was rejected by Worcester Superior Court Judge Timothy Hillman, who it was later revealed had once represented the victim's daughter in a probate matter related to her father's estate. Rehnquist appealed the decision where he was again denied. In June 2006 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court agreed to hear the case. On March 23, 2007 the Supreme Judicial Court unanimously upheld LaGuer's conviction.
Read more about this topic: Benjamin La Guer
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