INNOCENCE: DNA Test Clears Three Wrongfully Convicted Inmates Who Might Have Been Executed

Two men who were serv­ing life sen­tences were exon­er­at­ed on September 16 from a Mississippi prison after 30 years. Phillip Bivens and Bobby Ray Dixon were accused of the 1979 rape and mur­der of Eva Gail Patterson. Larry Ruffin, a co-defen­dant who died in prison eight years ago, will be posthumously exonerated. 

Ruffin was the first defen­dant to be arrest­ed for the crime. Dixon and Bivens were lat­er charged as co-con­spir­a­tors, even though Patterson’s 4‑year-old son, who wit­nessed the crime, tes­ti­fied that there had only been one man at the scene. 

Bivens was threat­ened with the death penal­ty, and, fear­ing for his life, backed up Dixon’s account that they were all at the crime scene that evening, even though Bivens had nev­er met Dixon before. Ruffin was con­vict­ed and faced the death penal­ty, but was giv­en a life sen­tence because of a hung jury. 

Lawyers from the Innocence Project, who accept­ed a request for help from Dixon, cit­ed stud­ies show­ing the ubiq­ui­ty of false con­fes­sions and request­ed a DNA test of the evi­dence from Patterson’s rape kit. In July, test results final­ly came back, impli­cat­ing a man who had been liv­ing near Patterson at the time of the crime and is now serv­ing a life sen­tence for a prior rape. 

Ruffin’s exon­er­a­tion will be the first instance in Mississippi where DNA evi­dence has cleared an inmate posthumously.