After spend­ing more than a decade in jail for a crime he did not com­mit, Douglas Arthur Warney has been exon­er­at­ed and will be freed from prison in New York based on DNA evi­dence. Police main­tained that Warney had con­fessed to the crime. Warney is a poor­ly edu­cat­ed man with a his­to­ry of delu­sions and suf­fer­ing from an advanced case of AIDS. He orig­i­nal­ly faced the death penal­ty for the 1996 stab­bing mur­der in Rochester, but was ulti­mate­ly con­vict­ed of sec­ond-degree homi­cide and sen­tenced to 25 years in jail. Prosecutors tried to block recent DNA tests that revealed that blood found at the crime scene could not have come from Warney. The test con­clud­ed that the blood belonged to anoth­er man, Eldred L. Johnson, Jr., who has since con­fessed to being the sole killer in the crime and is in prison for a dif­fer­ent killing and three oth­er stab­bings.

Though no foren­sic evi­dence linked Warney to the crime, pros­e­cu­tors used his false con­fes­sion — which defense attor­neys say was based on facts fed to him by a homi­cide detec­tive — to over­come weak­ness­es in the case. During Warney’s tri­al, pros­e­cu­tors said that blood found at the crime that did not match the vic­tim or Warney could have belonged to an accom­plice, but that Warney was the killer based on his detailed con­fes­sion. Despite pro­vid­ing details regard­ing the crime, Warney’s con­fes­sion was also filled with incon­sis­ten­cies. According to tri­al tes­ti­mo­ny, Mr. Warney told the detec­tive he had dri­ven to the vic­tim’s house in his broth­er’s car, although the broth­er had not owned the car for six years before the mur­der; he said he dis­posed of his bloody clothes after the mur­der in a garbage can, but none were found in a search of the can, which had been buried in snow from the day of the crime; he also said he had an accom­plice, nam­ing a rel­a­tive who, it turned out, was in a secure rehabilitation center. 

Warney joins a long list of peo­ple who have false­ly con­fessed to crimes they did not com­mit. ​“The cops cre­at­ed a false con­fes­sion by feed­ing non­pub­lic details to Doug. Their con­duct was crim­i­nal, plain and sim­ple,” notes Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project, one of the attor­neys rep­re­sent­ing Warney. Based on the results of DNA test­ing and Johnson’s con­fes­sion to the crime, pros­e­cu­tors have agreed that the charges against Warney, who is now in a wheel­chair, should be dis­missed. (New York Times, May 16, 2006). See Innocence.

Citation Guide