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Lonnie Erby
(pictured with
Barry Scheck)
Man cleared by DNA tests
is freed after 17 years
By Peter Shinkle, St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, August 25, 2003
After 17 years in prison -
most of it seeking DNA tests to prove his innocence - Lonnie
Erby walked free Monday because genetic testing conclusively
showed he had not committed two of the three rapes for which
he was convicted.
Officials accepted his innocence
of the third crime as well and canceled all three convictions
in connection with the apparent serial rapes of three girls in
separate incidents in 1985 in St. Louis.
Erby won the tests with the
help of the Innocence Project and over the objections of Circuit
Attorney Jennifer Joyce, who later changed her mind and on Monday
joined a celebration that lauded the results.
The event cooled, at least
for the moment, a sometimes-bitter struggle between the Innocence
Project and Joyce's standards for contesting DNA reviews.
Erby, who was sentenced in
1986 to 115 years in prison, was hugged Monday by his sister
and a son he had seen just once during his prison term.
"I've got dreams, you
know. I want to go places and do things that I never got the
chance to do," said Erby, 49, surrounded by a throng of
well-wishers.
Circuit Judge Jimmie Edwards,
who ordered Erby released, said, "I'm sorry for your wrongful
conviction. As you know, the science of today is not the science
of yesterday."
The judge's decision came eight
years after the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group formed by
defense attorneys, first asked that evidence against Erby be
made available for DNA testing.
Joyce fought it, taking the
position that DNA testing causes unnecessary upheaval for victims
and their families and unneeded expense in cases in which it
cannot conclusively rule out guilt.
"I did not feel that we
had a situation where the DNA could exonerate him," she
said.
Since one of the three victims
had bathed away evidence of semen, Joyce indicated, it could
be argued that DNA could not conclusively say Erby was innocent
of all three crimes.
Every victim had picked out
Erby as her attacker, officials said.
But after a circuit judge ordered
testing in the case, and the Missouri Court of Appeals upheld
it, Joyce agreed to permit it.
She appeared Monday in court
beside nationally known defense attorney Barry Scheck, an Innocence
Project founder, and made a tightly scripted joint motion to
overturn Erby's conviction. Joyce congratulated Scheck and his
co-counsel, Vanessa Potkin.
Referring to the victims, Joyce
said, "My heart goes out to them, but my job is to pursue
justice, and in this case, having Mr. Erby serve time for rapes
he didn't do isn't justice."
Joyce called on the Missouri
Legislature to pass a law to help people exonerated of crimes
in finding jobs and blending back into society. Currently, those
people receive less help than someone who is on parole, she said.
Erby had been convicted of
three attacks in 1985:
A 14-year-old girl, walking
home from a market, was pulled into a garage and raped and sodomized
on July 26. She bathed before calling police.
Another 14-year-old girl was
raped in an alley as she took out the trash on Aug. 22.
A 16-year-old girl was raped
in a vacant building.
Erby was tried but acquitted
of an attempted rape of two teens on Sept. 30 that year.
Four days after the last attack,
police responding to a report that a man was peeping into the
window of a home arrested Erby. In a line-up later, all five
victims of the four incidents identified Erby as the attacker,
prosecutors said.
He had a previous conviction,
having pleaded guilty to sexual abuse in 1982.
Erby requested DNA testing
as early as 1988, when it first became available, Scheck said
Monday. By 1995, he had contacted the Innocence Project, and
it made its first request that year. Eventually, it filed a suit
on behalf of Erby and six others.
The following year, the Missouri
General Assembly passed a law enabling convicts to obtain DNA
testing if they could show that they would not have been convicted
if a favorable result had been available when they were tried.
Illinois has a similar law.
Of the seven St. Louis area
inmates who asked Missouri authorities to permit DNA testing
with the help of the Innocence Project, Erby is the second to
win his freedom. The first was Larry Johnson, who was exonerated
in July 2002 after spending 16 years in prison for a rape in
1984. Testing in the cases of the other five men led to confirmations
of their guilt.
In the courtroom Monday, Erby's
sister, Evelyn Erby, said, "I feel there are many wrongfully
convicted people incarcerated. However, this is America, and
there is a process by which wrongfully convicted prisoners have
an opportunity, if they're lucky, to gain their freedom."
Dawayne Erby, 27, the newly
freed man's son, was unable to have his father attend his wedding
in May. But he refused to dwell on the years his father lost,
saying, "This is a beautiful day."
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
