The headline “Murderer asks for new DNA tests of victim’s clothes” regarding the Dennis Dechaine case must be challenged.  Dechaine was convicted of murder, but there is no proof that he is in fact a murderer. The case against Dechaine was built entirely on circumstantial evidence, and offered no proof of guilt.

By contrast, the science-based evidence supported Dechaine’s claim of  innocence. However, the jury never heard that male DNA from the victim’s fingernail was not Dechaine’s because the judge denied Dechaine’s request for DNA testing. (After Dechaine filed an appeal much physical evidence was incinerated.) Dechaine’s lawyer missed the critical significance of time-of-death evidence that placed Dechaine with the police before the murder took place. That no hair, fingerprints, or scent were found in Dechaine’s truck was explained by the prosecutor as being an act of God. And since the judge had not permitted testimony regarding other suspects, the jury was told that there were none, although there clearly were.

The history of the Dechaine case exemplifies the intransigence of the state and the courts against allowing for the possibility that the system sometimes makes mistakes, and that an innocent man has been imprisoned since 1988 while a psychopathic killer who brutalized and murdered a little girl has gone free.

William Bunting

Whitefield