Maryland pros­e­cu­tors used the same DNA evi­dence that freed Kirk Bloodsworth (pic­tured) from Maryland’s death row to secure a life-in-prison sen­tence for Kimberly Shay Ruffner, the man who has now con­fessed to the 1984 mur­der of Dawn Hamilton. Bloodsworth spent years on death row for the rape and mur­der of Hamilton before DNA evi­dence con­clu­sive­ly showed that he could not have com­mit­ted the crime. In 1993, he became the first death row inmate in the coun­try to be freed on the basis of DNA test­ing. Despite the fact that Ruffner was a known sex­u­al offend­er with an inter­est in young girls who lived near the scene of the Hamilton mur­der, police failed to link him to the crime and instead focused on Bloodsworth. It was not until a decade after Bloodsworth’s release, in August 2003, that pros­e­cu­tors test­ed the DNA from the crime scene against sam­ples tak­en from offend­ers with­in their sys­tem. They dis­cov­ered that it matched Ruffner, who was in prison serv­ing a 45-year sen­tence for a sim­i­lar attack that occurred just three weeks after Bloodsworth’s arrest for the Hamilton mur­der. Following the dis­cov­ery of this match, pros­e­cu­tors apol­o­gized to Bloodsworth for wrong­ly con­vict­ing him of the crime and for not dis­put­ing claims that he was guilty of the crime despite his exon­er­a­tion from death row. Prosecutors for­mal­ly charged Ruffner short­ly after the DNA match came to light and in late May 2004 suc­cess­ful­ly won a life sen­tence con­vic­tion, which Ruffner will begin to serve after his cur­rent sen­tence is com­plet­ed. (The Baltimore Sun, May 22, 2004) See Innocence.

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