DNA Evidence Frees
Man After 15 Years in Prison
By FERNANDA SANTOS
and MARIA NEWMAN
NYTimes on the Web.
September 20, 2006
WHITE PLAINS, NY -- In 1990, a
jury convicted Jeffrey Mark Deskovic, then 16, of raping, beating and strangling
a high school classmate, even though jurors were told the DNA evidence in the
case did not point to him.
They believed a police detective, who testified that Mr. Deskovic had confessed
to the crime. A judge sentenced him to 15 years to life in prison, and at
age 17 Mr. Deskovic was locked up.
Today, another judge set the 33-year-old Mr. Deskovic free, saying he agreed
with his lawyers and the Westchester district attorney that more sophisticated
DNA testing showed that someone else had killed and raped Angela Correa in
November 1989.
When he heard that he was being set free, Mr. Deskovic, who has been arguing his
innocence for years, sat speechless for a few minutes. Then he hugged his
lawyers and walked out of the courtroom.
Afterward, he talked to reporters and others about his overwhelming sense of
relief, mixed with anger, over what he has lost by spending almost half his life
behind bars for a crime he did not commit.
“I was supposed to finish out my education, begin a career,” he said.
“Marry, have a family, spend some time with my family, share the last years of
my grandmother’s life with her.”
He said his plans to marry his girlfriend were thwarted when he went to prison.
His family grew apart.
“My family has become strangers to me,” Mr. Deskovic said.
Angela Correa and Mr. Deskovic were both students at Peekskill High School, but
shared only a couple of classes. In November 1998, her partly nude body
was found in the woods behind an elementary school two days after her parents
reported her missing. She was 15.
Court records show that the police became suspicious of Mr. Deskovic when he
showed unusual interest in the case, telling the police he was investigating the
case himself, and visiting the crime scene.
Mr. Deskovic and his lawyers said that a confession he made to the police was
coerced and that it came after hours of an interrogation that violated his
constitutional rights because he was not given an opportunity to seek legal
counsel.
Mr. Deskovic pleaded not guilty from the beginning of the case, and DNA evidence
from the crime scene indicated he was not involved in the murder.
Even after he was imprisoned, Mr. Deskovic insisted he had not killed Ms.
Correa, taking his case to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear the matter.
Finally, with the aid of the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal clinic at the
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, the Westchester district attorney
considered results of more sophisticated DNA evidence that pointed to someone
else.
Prosecutors ran the results of the testing through a national databank, which
turned up a match to another inmate already serving a life sentence for another
Westchester murder.
The Westchester district attorney, Janet DiFiore, said the inmate, who has yet
to be publicly identified, has confessed to the murder, and her office is
pursuing an investigation.
Stephen Pittari, head of the Westchester Legal Aid Society, said Mr. Deskovic’s
case demonstrated the importance of videotaping all confessions, and said the
police and prosecutors must respect the right to counsel.
“It’s terrible what happened to him,” Mr. Pittari told The Journal News, a
newspaper in New York’s Lower Hudson Valley. “It’s bad enough to do hard
time, but when you’re an innocent person and a 17-year-old at that? You’ve
lost your entire youth and young adulthood.”
Also at the courthouse today was Pedro Rivera, the stepfather of the victim.
Mr. Rivera, 62, who only learned that Mr. Deskovic might be freed when a
reporter contacted him on Tuesday, said he had long doubted the conviction.
“I had a feeling that they had the wrong guy,” he said, adding that Mr. Deskovic
had spent time with his family after Angela’s death, even though he and Angela
had not been close friends.
“He went to church with our family, he ate at our home, he was a friend,” he
said. “He lost all his life. He didn’t finish school. He lost
the best years of his life.”
After he left the courthouse, Mr. Deskovic went to lunch at an Italian
restaurant with his mother, two aunts and his lawyers.
Mr. Deskovic talked about how he spent his years in prison.
He played chess constantly, he said. And he converted to Islam.
“It was a major factor in surviving prison in terms of my mental sanity,” he
said. “It gave me something else to throw myself to.”
Fernanda Santos reported from White Plains and Maria Newman
from New York.
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