The U-M Innocence Clinic

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Then there’s Lorinda Swain of Calhoun County, convicted of performing oral sex on her adopted son when he was six to nine years old. She’s been in jail for eight years based solely on the son’s testimony at age fourteen, when he claimed Swain had assaulted him each morning while his younger brother waited outside for the school bus. Her son, now twenty-two, has recanted, saying he made up the story as an explanation for his own behavior after he was caught engaging in inappropriate sexual conduct with a younger cousin. The Innocence Clinic also has testimony exonerating Swain from a neighbor, the boy’s younger brother, and the school bus driver.

In another chilling case, Karl Vinson was convicted in 1986 for the rape of a ten-year-old girl. The semen found at the crime scene was tested and did not yield Vinson’s blood type—but the prosecutors argued that he was a “non­secretor” whose blood type would not show up in other bodily fluids. His fingerprints were not found either—but the prosecutor explained that away by claiming that nonsecretors don’t leave fingerprints either. That’s not true—and Moran calls it an example of the “junk science” that often leads to wrongful convictions.

DNA testing was available by the mid-1990s and might have cleared Vinson, but Detroit police by then had disposed of the evidence. Early this year, a U‑M chemistry professor tested Vinson in prison. It turned out that he actually is a secretor, meaning his blood type should have been detectable in semen. The students will use that and other new evidence to try to reopen his case.