46-year inmate says DNA proves innocence
Sherman Brown has been imprisoned since 1970 for a grisly child murder
When Sherman Brown was convicted and imprisoned in the killing of a 4-year-old Virginia boy, the Vietnam War was still raging and the Watergate was just a hotel, not a scandal.
Then 22 years old, he maintained his innocence. Now, Brown is petitioning Virginia’s Supreme Court, saying DNA collected from newly recovered evidence indicates that he could not have committed the murder.
Justices now will have to weigh whether that genetic evidence is strong enough to warrant overturning his 1970 conviction.
If Brown, 69, is exonerated, he would be among the longest-serving prisoners to be cleared of a crime in the history of the nation. It would be an extraordinary turnabout for a man who was initially sentenced to death before the sentence was reduced to life.
“Recent DNA testing demonstrates by clear and convincing evidence what I have maintained for over 45 years: that I am innocent of this crime,” Brown wrote in his writ of actual innocence filed in early October.
Brown was convicted of first-degree murder after a 1969 attack near Charlottesville, Va., during which a woman was beaten, stabbed and possibly raped in her home. The same man also fatally stabbed the woman’s 4-year-old son, leaving him face down on his bed.
The mother survived and identified Brown as her attacker. He was also linked to the crime via a type of fibre and hair analysis that the FBI in recent years has acknowledged is flawed, in part after reporting by the Washington Post.
Brown writes in court filings that new tests ruled him out as the source of a partial male DNA profile found in a recently recovered slide containing a vaginal swab taken from the woman after the attack.
The tests also showed a greater than 98 per cent chance that the material did not come from the woman’s husband, according to the filing. The woman recently told prosecutors she had a monogamous relationship with her husband, Brown’s attorneys said in the court papers, arguing that the DNA must have come from an unidentified third man who was the actual attacker.
Brown’s attorneys said that the type of DNA recovered from the swab cannot be matched against DNA samples of known perpetrators contained in state or federal databases.
Brown had recently returned from serving in the Vietnam War when the events of Oct. 1, 1969, unfolded. Prosecutors said at trial that a man knocked on the door of the woman’s home that afternoon and attacked her and her son.
Later that afternoon, the woman’s sister-inlaw came to the house and found the woman and her son beaten and stabbed. Her underwear had also been removed.
Prosecutors argued at trial that the suspect raped or tried to rape the woman and killed her son to try to get rid of any witnesses. An analysis of the woman’s vaginal swab performed after the attack indicated the presence of sperm, according to Brown’s filing.
At trial, the woman was the sole eyewitness who identified Brown as her attacker.
In his filings, Brown denies ever meeting the woman and said she may have misidentified him because they are of different races. Brown is African-American and the woman is white.
At trial, an FBI agent testified that Brown’s hair was found on a sweatshirt that also contained fibres that matched a robe the woman was wearing during the attack, tying Brown to the crime. The woman’s testimony and forensic evidence was enough for an all-white jury to convict Brown after a brief deliberation.
In 2008, the Innocence Project began DNA testing in the case. After an audit, the Justice Department also recently told Brown’s attorneys that the FBI agent erred in his analysis of the hairs found on the sweatshirt.
But the true break came last year, when the University of Virginia’s Innocence Project discovered a slide containing the vaginal swab at the school’s department of pathology.
If exonerated, Brown would join Earl Washington Jr. as the only other person to have sat on death row in the state before being cleared of a crime.
“It’s very tragic to think someone has been in prison for four decades and he may actually be innocent of the crime,” said Susan Friedman, an attorney with the Innocence Project.