Convicting the Innocent by Stanley Cohen

Author:Stanley Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

Gary Dotson

Illinois

Gary Dotson was the victim of a hoax. He was convicted of raping a young woman who was never in fact assaulted in a trial that rested almost exclusively on the false testimony of a police forensic scientist. Ironically, it was old-fashioned blood typing that was used to convict him, and breakthrough DNA blood testing that finally set him free.

The web of events in which Dotson became trapped began on the night of July 9, 1977. A police patrol officer noticed a young woman standing alongside a road near a shopping mall in Homewood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. It was late at night and she looked disheveled and appeared to be distressed. The officer asked if she was all right. The woman identified herself as Cathleen Crowell. She was sixteen years old and worked as a cashier and cook in a fast-food chain restaurant in the mall. Then she related the following tale:

After leaving work, she was walking across the mall parking lot when a car with three young men in it pulled up alongside her. Two of the men grabbed her and threw her into the rear seat. One of the men climbed into the back seat with her, tore her clothes off, raped her, and scratched several letters onto her midsection with a broken beer bottle.

The officer took her to a hospital where a rape examination revealed what appeared to be a seminal stain on her panties. Several pubic hairs and a vaginal smear were taken as evidence. A drawing was made of the marks on her abdomen. The letters were illegible and appeared to be shaped in an unusual crosshatched pattern.

Three days later, Crowell’s parents took her to the police station where she worked with a sketch artist to develop a likeness of her assailant. She described him as a young, white male with stringy shoulder-length hair. She did not mention his having any facial hair. When police showed her a mug book she identified Gary Dotson, a twenty-two-year-old high school dropout who had had minor brushes with the law in the past. The police arrested Dotson at his nearby home in a working-class suburb where he lived with his mother and sister. Although Dotson wore a full mustache which could not have been grown in the five days since the alleged attack, Crowell nonetheless picked him out in a police lineup.

Dotson went on trial for rape in May 1979. There were two chief witnesses for the prosecution. Crowell, who appeared to be a model student at her local high school where she studied Russian and was a member of the junior varsity swimming team, identified Dotson with total conviction, saying, “There is no mistaking that face.” The other key witness was Timothy Dixon, a state police forensic scientist who had been assigned to the case. It was Dixon’s testimony regarding blood types that probably clinched the case against Dotson, adding scientific near-certainty to Crowell’s eyewitness identification. The problem was that Crowell was lying and Dixon was offering information that was at best incomplete, at worst intentionally misleading.

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