MILWAUKEE - A man sentenced to life in prison for killing a woman in 1984 had his conviction overturned and was released Friday after spending 23 years behind bars.
Robert Lee Stinson, 44, walked out of the New Lisbon Correctional Institution in street clothes and hugged his sister and members of the Wisconsin Innocence Project. A judge vacated the sentence after the Project argued that bite-mark analysis and DNA evidence didn't match evidence from the crime scene, defense attorney Byron Lichstein said.
Stinson was convicted in 1985 of first-degree murder in the death of a 63-year-old Milwaukee woman. Evidence suggested she had been raped, and her body also had eight different bite marks, Lichstein said.
At trial, two forensic odontologists testified that Stinson's teeth were a match, even though Stinson was apparently missing a tooth in a place where the bite marks indicated a tooth, Lichstein said.
Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm said in a statement Friday that Stinson's conviction was not wrongful, and that he was convicted based on "state-of-the-art scientific evidence available at the time of his trial."
"The question today is whether there is newly discovered evidence in this case to warrant a new trial, and we agree that such evidence exists," Chisholm said. The statement did not specify the evidence.
Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Norman Gahn said he has six months to decide whether to retry Stinson. - NBC News
This is for all the Forensic File people out there. I think that it is great if they can find someone who was wrongly convicted and make a right out of wrong. I just keep flashing back to another man here in Wisconsin who was released after they found out he was wrongly convicted and he went on to Murder someone.
Either way, I hope he makes a good life for himself.
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