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

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On 21 August 2007 Carrie Cassidy of The Patriot-News reported “Judge allows lawsuit in wrongful conviction”.

She said a freed man alleges conspiracy in slaying case. A Hanover man who spent 16 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of murdering his elderly neighbor should have a chance to pursue a lawsuit against two state troopers and a former state police chemist, a federal judge has ruled. The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, alleges Barry Laughman's conviction in the 1987 slaying was the result of an ongoing conspiracy to obtain and cover up wrongful convictions. Troopers John J. Holtz and Donald Blevins and former state police chemist Janice Roadcap are accused in the civil lawsuit of obtaining a false confession from Laughman and concocting theories about contradictory physical evidence. Laughman, 44, was released in November 2003 after testing done on missing DNA samples tracked down by The Patriot-News cleared him of the crime. In rejecting a request to dismiss the lawsuit against the three, US District Judge Yvette Kane in Harrisburg found there were enough questions about Laughman's alleged confession to merit a trial. "The court finds that a reasonable juror could find from the facts in dispute that defendants knew that no confession occurred and thus arrested Laughman without probable cause," Kane wrote in her Aug. 16 order denying the motion for summary judgment filed by the state attorney general's office.

The case is to go to trial Sept. 4.

Leslie M. Fields, one of Laughman's attorneys, said Kane's opinion is "clearly a very thoughtful and careful analysis of the law as it applies to this case." "We are prepared to go forward with this case and to bring closure to this unspeakable nightmare for Barry Laughman," said Fields, of the law firm Costopoulos, Foster & Fields. Laughman was convicted of raping and murdering Edna Laughman, 85, a distant relative, in 1987. His conviction was based largely on a confession Holtz said he obtained. He said the mildly retarded man knew details of the crime known only to the killer. lang=EN-AU>While Laughman's blood type is different from that of semen left on the victim, Roadcap offered explanations for the discrepancies. In later testimony, experts called her explanations junk science.

The prosecution had sought the death penalty against Laughman, but the jury spared his life after former Adams County Judge Oscar Spicer told them they should consider the fact that the police had destroyed evidence that could have exonerated Laughman. DNA testing was in its infancy at the time, but Spicer gave the remaining samples to Laughman's court-appointed attorneys and left the case open. An attorney sent the samples to a Penn State University professor in 1994 but never followed up when the professor asked for a comparative sample.

In May 2003, Patriot-News reporter Pete Shellem traced the DNA to professor Mark Stoneking, who was teaching at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Stoneking had preserved the samples, and later testing cleared Laughman. Kane's decision is the latest in the suit that has wound through the federal courts since Laughman filed the papers in May 2005, more than a year after his release from prison. Kane previously released Adams County, its prosecutors' office and the three former commissioners from Laughman's lawsuit.

Timothy P. Keating, who is heading up the case for the attorney general's office, declined to comment yesterday. The office is representing Holtz, Blevins and Roadcap. After his release, Laughman returned to his job at a fertilizer company where he had worked before his arrest. The boss said no one in the community ever believed he was guilty.

Source: 21 August 2007 Carrie Cassidy The Patriot-News “Judge allows lawsuit in wrongful conviction”.

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