Part two of two. Read part one here.
Jane Raley, an attorney at Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, was sitting at her desk on November 16, 2004, when she got the news she’d been waiting a year to hear—and that her client had been seeking for decades. The news came in the form of a phone call from Cellmark Diagnostics, a testing lab in North Carolina. When Raley heard what lab technicians had to say, she immediately broke down in tears.
The semen definitively did not belong to Andre Davis.
An inmate exonerated by DNA waits, on average, two years before being released from prison, according to Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Convicting the Innocent. That figure, horrifying as it is, actually represents progress—”in the 1990s people didn’t understand DNA the way they do today,” he says.
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In the meantime, in October 2005, an intern with the Center on Wrongful Convictions finally tracked down the state’s star witness from Andre’s trial, Don Douroux, who was by then in his 60s. Don—a friend of Andre’s who’d been the first person to discover Brianna’s body at a mutual friend’s house—was working as an electrician and living in San Antonio.
The intern explained to Don over the phone that DNA tests—which hadn’t been available at the time of the 1980 prosecution—suggested someone other than Andre had committed the crime. Don was polite and spoke freely. “He expressed concern for Andre and seemed eager to help,” according to the center’s notes from the interview. This was despite the fact that Don had recalled to police the night of the crime—and later to a jury—that Andre had confessed the murder to him.
Years after the testimony, Illinois’s medical board charged Raquel with six counts of medical fraud. He had prescribed medical equipment to people who weren’t his patients and billed for medical services he never rendered. In 1991, Raquel was placed on probation for four years and required to complete 100 hours of continuing medical education and pay a $7,500 fine. Soon after, the State of New York, where Raquel was also authorized to practice medicine, censured and reprimanded him, requiring him to perform 100 hours of community service. Though the charges didn’t discredit Raquel’s testimony against Andre, Raley felt it at least made his testimony questionable.
The state was again unimpressed by the findings. On October 15, 2007, three years after the results of the first DNA test came back, prosecutors retained DNA lab SERI to run their own tests.
