- DETROIT (Reuters) - DNA evidence on Monday helped
overturn the conviction of a Detroit man who spent 17 years in prison for
the rape and murder of a teen-age girl.
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- Eddie Joe Lloyd, 54, became the 110th person in the United
States to be exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing, according to the
Innocence Project, a nonprofit New York-based legal group that promotes
the use of DNA evidence.
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- Lloyd was also the first such person in Michigan, which
does not have a death penalty, prosecutors said. A Michigan law that took
effect in January last year allows inmates convicted of a felony to ask
courts for DNA testing and a new trial if they can show the tests might
prove their innocence.
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- Lloyd was a patient at the Detroit Psychiatric Institute
when police said he confessed on audiotape to raping and strangling high
school student Michelle Jackson, 16, in January 1984.
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- His lawyers argued police got Lloyd to confess by telling
him his confession would help "smoke out" the real perpetrator
of the crime. Later, Lloyd proclaimed his innocence.
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- A Wayne County Circuit Court judge overturned Lloyd's
May 1985 conviction on Monday and ordered his immediate release, after
Wayne County Prosecutor Michael Duggan said recently completed DNA tests
showed he could not have committed the crime.
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- The Innocence Project and Saul Green, a former United
States attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, had joined Duggan
in pressing for Lloyd's exoneration.
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- Green and the Innocence Project are also calling for
a federal probe of the police officers who investigated the Jackson case
and purportedly elicited the false confession from Lloyd.
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- "Unfortunately Miss Jackson couldn't speak from
the grave," Lloyd told reporters after he was set free. "But
modern man and forensic science did what she couldn't do, and that's to
speak from the grave."
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