Forensic Testing Casts New Doubt on Guilt of Ledell Lee, Executed in Arkansas in 2017

Posthumous foren­sic test­ing of evi­dence in the case of Ledell Lee (pic­tured), who was exe­cut­ed in Arkansas in 2017, has found DNA from an uniden­ti­fied male on a bloody club used to kill Debra Reese 29 years ago and on a blood-soaked shirt that was wrapped around the weapon. The DNA results, released by the Innocence Project and the ACLU on April 30, 2021, raise addi­tion­al trou­bling ques­tions about Lee’s conviction. 

Lee, who con­sis­tent­ly main­tained his inno­cence of the crime, was exe­cut­ed on April 20, 2017. He was one of four men put to death in a span of eight days as Arkansas rushed to con­duct exe­cu­tions before its lethal-injec­tion drugs expired. The state sched­uled eight exe­cu­tions over an eleven-day peri­od, jam­ming the courts with exe­cu­tion-relat­ed lit­i­ga­tion and impair­ing judi­cial review of the cases. 

At the time of Lee’s 1995 tri­al, DNA test­ing tech­niques were unable to deter­mine whether evi­dence from the scene impli­cat­ed him. As tech­nol­o­gy improved, Lee sought new test­ing, includ­ing in a fil­ing imme­di­ate­ly before his exe­cu­tion. Another Arkansas man, Stacey Johnson, who was sched­uled for exe­cu­tion the same night as Lee, was grant­ed a stay on a near­ly iden­ti­cal request for DNA testing.

After Lee was exe­cut­ed, his fam­i­ly, with the help of the ACLU and the Innocence Project, filed a Freedom of Information Act law­suit seek­ing DNA test­ing of evi­dence from the case. Though pros­e­cu­tors had opposed the request before Lee’s death, the City of Jacksonville, Arkansas now had cus­tody of the evi­dence, and the city coun­cil unan­i­mous­ly grant­ed the request. Jacksonville Mayor Bob Johnson said, ​“I look at it this way. If a gen­tle­man was put to death and shouldn’t have been, that means there’s a mur­der­er loose some­where in Jacksonville or Arkansas or [the U.S.] and they need to be brought to jus­tice.” He called the council’s deci­sion ​“the right move.”

The tests found that the DNA on the mur­der weapon and bloody shirt did not belong to Lee, but it did not pro­duce any match­es in nation­wide DNA data­bas­es. None of the fin­ger­prints from the crime scene match Lee, but they also did not turn up any match­es in a nation­al data­base. Hairs from the scene were also test­ed. Five could not have come from Lee, and the sixth con­tained a mito­chon­dr­i­al DNA pro­file that did not exclude Lee, but accord­ing to the Innocence Project, ​“may be shared by thou­sands of indi­vid­u­als in a giv­en pop­u­la­tion.” Results from trace amounts of DNA from one of Lee’s shoes were incon­clu­sive, but did not exclude the vic­tim, Debra Reese, as a poten­tial con­trib­u­tor to the mix­ture. However, the test­ed area was neg­a­tive for blood. Because the mur­der­er was in close con­tact with the vic­tim, a pathol­o­gist has attest­ed that it would have been impos­si­ble for the killer to have lit­tle to no blood on the cloth­ing and shoes he wore. All tests of Lee’s cloth­ing to date have been neg­a­tive for blood from the victim.

“While the results obtained 29 years after the evi­dence was col­lect­ed proved to be incom­plete and par­tial, it is notable that there are now new DNA pro­files that were not avail­able dur­ing the tri­al and post-con­vic­tion pro­ceed­ings in Mr. Lee’s case,” Nina Morrison, Innocence Project senior lit­i­ga­tion coun­sel, said in a state­ment. ​“We are hope­ful that one or more of these foren­sic law enforce­ment data­bas­es will gen­er­ate addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion in the future.” Lee’s sis­ter, Patricia Young, said, ​“We are glad there is new evi­dence in the nation­al DNA data­base and remain hope­ful that there will be fur­ther infor­ma­tion uncov­ered in the future.”

Numerous death-row pris­on­ers have been denied poten­tial­ly excul­pa­to­ry DNA testing. Tennessee exe­cut­ed Sedley Alley in 2006 after refus­ing him access to evi­dence for DNA tests. His daugh­ter is now seek­ing posthu­mous DNA test­ing and the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals heard argu­ment on her request in February 2021. As of 2018, Florida courts had refused 70 requests for DNA test­ing from death-row pris­on­ers. Georgia denied test­ing to three pris­on­ers sched­uled for exe­cu­tion in 2019 and 2020. Two were exe­cut­ed, while the third was grant­ed clemen­cy on separate grounds.