Networked Knowledge - Science Report

[This edited version of the report has been prepared by Dr Robert N Moles]

DNA homepage
Criminal issues Homepage
Death Penalty homepage
Article on Australian miscarriage of justice cases
Article on UK miscarriage of justice cases
Article on USA miscarriage of justice cases

On 16 July 2007 Paul Pinkham of The Times-Union reported Chad Heins gains new trial because of DNA.

He said new DNA findings will lead to a second jury deciding if he killed woman in '94. More than a decade after he was convicted of his pregnant sister-in-law's brutal murder, Chad Heins will be retried because of retested DNA evidence that revealed an unknown man's blood and hair in her Mayport apartment. Prosecutors dropped their appeal Monday of a Jacksonville judge's order throwing out Heins' 1996 guilty verdict. They will retry him for first-degree murder and attempted sexual battery, State Attorney Harry Shorstein said.

Lawyers for The Innocence Project who have worked for Heins' release since 2003 applauded the decision, though it stopped short of the outright exoneration they are seeking. "We believe Chad should have been out of prison years ago," said Nina Morrison, staff attorney for the New York-based legal group that uses DNA to free the wrongly convicted. "Three years after the new DNA evidence was discovered, this conviction is finally history. But unfortunately, Chad will have to continue to battle to prove his innocence."

Heins, 33, will be arraigned Thursday, and his lawyers said they hope to get him released to his parents in Wisconsin. His mother and stepfather plan to be in court. He has no family in Jacksonville. Assistant State Attorney Richard Mantei said prosecutors will seek a substantial bail amount but wouldn't disclose how much. "We will do what we think is necessary to protect the citizens of Jacksonville and Wisconsin," Mantei said.

Heins will be transferred from the state prison system to the Duval County jail pending the outcome of Thursday's bail hearing. He has said he was passed out drunk on the living room couch in April 1994 when Tina Heins was stabbed 27 times and raped in the bedroom of the apartment she shared with her husband, Jeremy. He was on a Navy ship at the time. Chad Heins, who was staying with his brother and sister-in-law, said he awoke to three fires set in the apartment. Prosecutors argued Chad Heins was the only person in the apartment, and his blood was found on a washcloth and mingled with hers in a sink drain. They said witnesses heard him tell his brother, "I didn't mean to do it." A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and attempted sexual battery. He was sentenced to a mandatory life prison term.

But Chad Heins contacted The Innocence Project in 2001. Project lawyers won retesting of the DNA evidence, which found hairs on her body and DNA under her fingernails didn't match either brother. Circuit Judge L. Page Haddock ruled there was a reasonable probability jurors would have acquitted Heins if they had known about that evidence and the fact his fingernails showed no evidence of contact with the victim. "It just was not worth the length and cost of fighting that decision," Mantei said of prosecutors' decision to drop the appeal. Shorstein called the case one of the most troubling his office has had during his 16-year term. "The new evidence is problematic, but the existing evidence is overwhelmingly hard to reconcile with innocence," Shorstein said. "To agree that he's entitled to a new trial is not in conflict with that view."

But Heins' lawyers said Haddock's rulings in the case show how strong the evidence of their client's innocence is. "The state has yet to proffer a theory ... as to who, other than the real assailant, is the source of this unidentified male DNA," Jacksonville attorney Robert Link said in his bail request.

Source: 16 July 2007 Paul Pinkham, The Times-Union “Brother-in-law gains new trial”

Top of Page