Swinton release highlights power of DNA

In 2001, Alfred Swinton was convicted in Hartford of the murder of Carla Terry in 1991 and sentenced to 60 years in prison. Last June, a judge vacated his conviction and ordered a new trial. On Thursday, the state told a judge that, after reexamining all the evidence, it had decided not to try him again. The judge dismissed the charges and Swinton walked out of court a free man.

Swinton’s conviction appeared to rest on substantial evidence. He had been seen with Terry before she disappeared. A bra found in a box of clothing in the basement of the apartment building where he lived at the time of the murder was one that Terry’s sister said she had given her. And there were bite marks on Terry’s breasts that a forensic dentist at the Connecticut Forensic Laboratory said matched the marks left by Swinton’s bite.

In 2015, examination of “touch DNA” — the DNA profile obtained from skin cells left on an object when a person touches it — collected from the bra revealed it came from someone other than Swinton or Terry. Using a new technique that enables a DNA profile to be extracted from only a few cells of a bodily fluid, the state forensic lab found that DNA obtained from the saliva in the bite mark on Terry’s right breast came from someone other than Swinton. And it found he was not the source of DNA found near Terry’s vagina and in scrapings from her fingernails.

In addition, the forensic dentist who testified that Swinton made the bite marks on Terry’s breasts submitted an affidavit in which he said he no longer believed “with reasonable medical certainty — or with any degree of certainty” that the bite marks on Terry were created by Swinton’s teeth; he said they could have been produced by “many thousands” of individuals.

In recent years, prosecutors across the country have become increasingly aware of the frequency and various causes of wrongful convictions and many, including the district attorneys of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston and other cities, have created conviction integrity units to reexamine the evidence in cases in which there’s reason to believe a wrongful conviction occurred.

Connecticut hasn’t created such a unit and, given its perilous fiscal condition, won’t be creating one anytime soon. But to their credit, Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane and Deputy Chief State’s Attorney Leonard Boyle, working with the state’s attorneys, have created a process that, in effect, does what a conviction integrity unit does.

The decision Thursday by Superior Court Judge Laura F. Baldini to dismiss the charges against Swinton reflects both the investigative value of recent advances in DNA analysis and the state’s commendable willingness to conduct what amounts to a conviction integrity review when presented with evidence of a possible wrongful conviction.