Most religious people are already motivated to help make the world a better place, but sometimes help is needed from other realms of society to bring this about. My goal in this essay is to show how a relatively new, but now widely accepted, application of DNA science has already helped make the world a better place for hundreds of individuals whose lives were torn apart by mistakes made within our criminal justice system. Specifically, I will focus here on how DNA profiling technology has become a leading scientific method used to fix mistakes and free people from jail after they have been wrongfully convicted. This includes many cases where innocent people lost 30 or more years of their lives to wrongful convictions, but where ultimately, irrefutable scientific evidence was used to validate their innocence and set them free.
Before getting into details, I would like to clarify that although the concept of “repairing the world” used in the title is not limited to any one religion, a major inspiration for this phrase as used here comes directly from verses in Parashah Kedoshim of the Book of Leviticus. And although a major emphasis in Leviticus is a straightforward listing of laws, this book also describes traditions that should be followed along with the legal dictates. For example, in Leviticus 19:16, we are told “You shall not stand idly by while your neighbor bleeds.” The intention of this phrase is to remind us that not only are we empowered to do right by others; it is something we are expected to do.
Within the Reform branch of Judaism (a movement started in Germany in the 1800s), this idea has grown to be of tremendous importance. As this movement grew in popularity, many traditional religious practices were abandoned. In their place, however, the concept of engaging in social action to “repair the world” by fixing perceived wrongs in society became a central theme of this movement’s identity.
This was the version of Judaism I grew up with in the 1960s. To give an example, the Rabbi in our small congregation in Los Angeles would take us through the motions to learn the bare minimum amount of Hebrew needed to complete our “Bar Mitzvah” coming-of-age ceremony. But, like many of his contemporaries, our Rabbi’s real passion was pursuing social action. At Friday night services we heard again and again how he, along with many others, had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama as part of the civil rights movement.
This was powerful stuff, and these messages no doubt inspired many others to do their part, including a New York lawyer named Barry Sheck at Yeshiva University who went on to found the Innocence Project. Other groups have been founded with similar goals, but Barry, together with Peter Neufeld, turned the project into a program – first national, and now international – dedicated to fulfilling the goal of repairing the world by helping people whose lives were torn asunder when they were victimized by mistakes made within a criminal justice system. The project has many tools available to identify possible cases of wrongful conviction, but the most powerful means for establishing actual innocence in the courtroom comes from looking at DNA.
How is it that DNA is used to establish innocence in the legal system? The basic idea is to compare the DNA from an individual (a suspect) with the DNA found in some biological material found at a crime scene. If the comparison shows that the DNA is not the same, it means that the suspect was not the person who left their DNA at the crime scene – someone else was there.
The total amount of DNA that each of us carries in our cells is relatively large – approximately 3 billion individual base pairs. And although the ability to make comparisons based on such large sets of material may be here sooner than we think, for now, only certain segments of DNA are used as genetic markers to represent an individual’s total DNA. In the current state of the art of forensic DNA testing, a set of 24 marker segments (known as the Combined DNA information system, or CODIS, markers) is typically used to develop a DNA profile for an individual. Each of the CODIS markers are derived from specific segments of DNA that are highly variable from one person to another. When combined, these markers can be used to produce a DNA profile that is essentially unique to each person. The suspect’s DNA profile is then compared with the DNA profile from any biological evidence material found at the crime scene.
How much material from a crime scene is needed to make such a comparison? Incredibly little. A single hair, a tiny drop of blood, or even some cells unintentionally left behind – such as when someone touches a doorknob – can provide enough material to work with. The ability to use such small amounts of material relies on another laboratory method called the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). In the laboratory, the PCR method can make large numbers of copies of the relevant DNA marker segments in just a few hours. This copying process is needed to make the individual DNA markers more easily visible. Next, a laboratory analyst will compare suspects’ DNA profiles with DNA profiles from evidence materials to see if they match. If they do not match, a given suspect should immediately be excluded as a person of interest.
Sadly, however, DNA testing is not done in many criminal cases, even when biological evidence is available. Faulty eye-witness identification is probably the most common reason that many innocent people are wrongfully convicted, especially when a lack of testing means these identifications are not challenged. The eye-witness method of identifying criminals is notoriously subjective and unreliable, but too often, it is a major factor in trial outcomes. DNA profiling, however, is not only considered to be more definitive for identification purposes, it should also be completely unbiased and objective. As Richard Lewontin, a famous evolutionary biologist, said many years ago: DNA is the truth. Because of this, the power of DNA for identifying individuals has allowed the criminal justice system to move away from its over-reliance on eye-witness identification.
Another advantage of using DNA is that it can often be recovered from materials such as clothing or other objects, even after surprisingly long periods of time. You’ve probably seen stories about DNA being recovered from Egyptian mummies or bones of Neanderthal individuals from thousands of years ago. The actual upper time limit for the preservation of DNA is not currently known, but at least in many criminal cases, we do know that DNA can routinely be recovered even from evidence items that are decades old.
To better illustrate the process used and the power of DNA technology in restoring justice by correcting wrongful convictions, I will provide here some details on a major case recently resolved by the Hawaii Innocence Project, the chapter of the project with which I work as a DNA consultant.
The crime and conviction
On Christmas Eve 1991, tragedy struck when a young woman named Dana Ireland was visiting a friend in an isolated community on the Big Island of Hawaii. Around 5:30 pm, a local woman found Dana lying in the bushes, the apparent victim of a violent sexual assault. The location was very remote, and it took an hour and a half for emergency services to arrive. Sadly, even after she was transported to the nearest hospital in Hilo, Dana died from the massive loss of blood.
Police began a search for possible perpetrators, but despite the high-profile nature of the case, years went by without progress. Suddenly in 1994, in exchange for personal benefits while in jail, a convicted rapist named Frank Pauline implicated himself and two brothers named Ian and Shawn Schweitzer in the crime. After a long chain of events, the Schweitzer brothers were indicted for the crime in 1999. Despite the lack of definitive evidence, Ian was convicted of Dana’s rape, kidnapping and murder, and sent to jail.
The long road to exoneration
One key evidence item recovered at the crime scene had been a t-shirt covered in blood. Most of the blood was from Dana herself, but in 2017 the Hawaii Innocence Project was able to arrange for a new type of DNA testing to be done using genetic markers originating from the Y chromosome. Because this chromosome is only found in males, this testing of material from the t-shirt showed the presence of a DNA profile specific to a male. In a major turn of events, it was immediately clear that this male profile did not match the DNA profiles of Frank Pauline or either of the Schweitzer brothers. It did, however, match with a DNA profile previously found in semen recovered from Dana’s body, and this became the DNA profile of an “unknown” male associated with the crime. To bolster the investigation, several other evidence items were also tested, but none of the DNA evidence ever produced could be linked to either of the Schweitzer brothers. With the information in hand that the brothers could not be connected to the crime, the Hawaii Innocence Project, together with National Innocence Project headquarters in New York, entered into a joint investigation with the Hawaii County Prosecutor’s Office to reopen the case and identify the “unknown male.” As has happened in other cases, prosecutors are sometimes willing to join in support of cases of wrongful conviction if they are convinced that the true perpetrators have not yet paid the price for their crimes.
By this time, Frank Pauline had died in prison. However, based on the new evidence, a petition to overturn the conviction of Ian Schweitzer was filed in 2023. Soon after, Judge Kubota of the Third Circuit Court in Hilo found that the new evidence would likely provide a convincing case for innocence. He immediately ordered that Ian’s conviction be vacated and that he should be released from custody. Ian walked out of the courtroom to rejoin his family as a free man that same day – 24 years after his wrongful conviction.
The epilogue
The vacating of Ian’s conviction still left open the question of who had actually carried out this horrific act. Fortunately, using even newer forms of DNA testing done in conjunction with genealogical studies, brilliant detective work by an investigator from a private company led to a likely suspect known to reside in the area where the original incident had occurred. Investigators followed this man and surreptitiously recovered a plastic fork he had thrown away with his lunch. The DNA profile obtained from the fork precisely matched the DNA profile of the unknown male that had first been found years ago. However, for better or worse, this whole sad saga ended a short time later, when this man found out what had been learned and committed suicide as the police were on their way to arrest him.
Beyond establishing innocence
The process of restoring justice continues, often long after such cases are completely resolved. It is up to each individual jurisdiction whether victims of wrongful conviction ever receive compensation for the years of their lives lost. Even when there is compensation, exonerated individuals face many challenges attempting to reintegrate into society after so many years of confinement in the rigid prison system. To help with these challenges, every year the Network of Innocence Projects holds a national conference where both recent and past exonerees attend at no cost to connect with each other and the volunteers that worked so hard to free them.
Emotions run very high at this conference, and one striking common theme played out over and over again among the exonerees is the phases each went through after being wrongfully imprisoned. The first phase involved being extremely angry at the injustice of the system. After an indeterminate period of time dealing with this anger, the second phase shifts to efforts to prove their innocence, no matter how daunting the task might appear. In the final phase, the vast majority of exonerees say they came to believe that God would provide a way for them to be vindicated. Seeing firsthand that this does happen makes one understand that miracles are still possible, especially when we humans do our part to help bring them about.
(David Haymer is Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology at the John A Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI.)
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