Expert: DNA matches Lane
By John Joyce
Published in News on May 12, 2015 1:46 PM
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News-Argus/MELISSA KEY
Eric Lane is escorted into court Monday for a hearing regarding court-ordered DNA evidence that could have exonerated the death row inmate. Instead, it might have sealed his fate.
Independently tested DNA evidence defense attorneys hoped would exonerate convicted killer Eric Glenn Lane in the 2002 rape and murder of 5-year-old Precious Ebony Whitfield failed to do so Monday.
The evidence instead isolated Lane as the sole contributor of DNA -- other than the victim -- to the samples tested.
N.C. State Bureau of Investigation's forensic analyst Mark Boodee, reading from the lab report, said it was 415 times more likely for African-Americans, 380 times more likely for Caucasians and 305 times more likely for Hispanics that the DNA profile derived from the testing would belong to Lane rather than another male randomly selected from the U.S. population.
In a different test, those numbers were in the millions for whites, and the billions for non-whites.
Lane is on death row following a 2005 conviction in the kidnapping, rape and killing of the 5-year-old. His attorney, Michael Unti, believed the newly testable DNA evidence would reveal the presence of a third party.
After his client was scientifically identified in court, Unti's position remained unchanged.
"We still believe that. We think there was a third party involved, but for different reasons now," Unti said after the hearing. He declined to elaborate on what other evidence he suspected might lead to identifying someone else as the child's killer.
Unti, at whose request the DNA samples were collected back in April and sent off to an independent lab in Salt Lake City, Utah, -- Sorenson Genomics -- questioned the chain of custody of the evidence.
"We have some real questions whether these samples have not been changed or altered," he said.
Unti told the court he intends to file motions requesting logs and other records showing the chain of custody of the evidence collected against Lane going all the way back to before his trial in 2005.
He said some of the evidence was found unsealed at the time it was collected in April to be sent to Sorenson.
State prosecutor Nicholas Vlahos of the U.S. Attorney General's Office Eastern District did not object to the motions -- should they be filed -- but requested time to review and to answer them before the court ruled on them.
Vlahos did take the time to recall Boodee to the stand to refute Unti's attack on the evidence.
Boodee was present at the time the evidence was collected in April. He said the evidence was gathered inside the very courtroom in which Monday's hearing took place, and the collection was done according to procedure. Vlahos added that some of the evidence boxes were unsealed because that evidence had been introduced at Lane's trial, and were therefore opened to be shown to the court at that time.
Unti has until June to file his new motions, and Vlahos has until July to answer them. All parties are due back in Wayne County Superior Court July 9 at 10 a.m.
Depending on the outcome of Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Arnold O. Jones' ruling on those and any later motions, all of these proceedings lay the groundwork for Unti to file a Motion for Appropriate Relief -- either in November or in January 2016 -- seeking a new trial.