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| DNA Tests Exonerate Mich. Man |
| By Detroit Free Press |
| Published: 06/19/2003 |
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A Macomb County man who has professed his innocence to rape and armed robbery from a prison cell for nearly a decade is likely to walk out of the Macomb County Courthouse a free man today, Prosecutor Carl Marlinga said last week. DNA testing of evidence, which was prompted by a challenge by the Innocence Project at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, has determined that an unknown person, not Kenneth Wyniemko, left traces of biological evidence at the Clinton Township home where a 28-year-old woman was raped repeatedly for four hours in April 1994. Marlinga and Wyniemko's attorney, Gail Pamukov, were expected to ask Macomb Circuit Judge Edward Servitto to grant Wyniemko bond based on the results. By Tuesday, Marlinga said he expects to file a request to have the case dismissed. He said he wants to talk further with investigators and the former assistant prosecutor who tried the case, but the DNA findings, released by the Michigan State Police Monday, convinced him that the wrong person likely went to prison. 'I simply need a couple of days to make sure there isn't something we're missing. A decision of this magnitude -- I want to make sure it's absolutely right,' Marlinga said. 'But it is absolutely clear to all of us that this person should be out of prison immediately.' Nationwide, there have been 128 DNA exonerations to date, said Kathy Swedlow of the Cooley Innocence Project. The first in Michigan was Eddie Joe Lloyd last August. He said Detroit Police tricked him into confessing to the rape and murder of 16-year-old Michelle Jackson in 1984. The release of Wyniemko leaves Clinton Township Police with an unsolved case because the DNA of the unknown person was run through a national DNA registry and no matches were found, Marlinga said. Wyniemko was sentenced to more than 60 years and was not eligible for parole until 2023. At the time, Clinton Township Police were confident that Wyniemko was the rapist, even though the far less-sophisticated scientific testing of the time -- mostly blood, semen and hair tests -- ruled him out as a suspect. Police said their case, though circumstantial, was strong based on the victim's identification and the fact that Wyniemko could not explain how he had come into nearly $3,000 -- almost $4,000 was stolen from the victim. Police maintained that Wyniemko expertly cleaned the crime scene and his victim, erasing all proof of his presence there. Clinton Township Police Chief Al Ernst said his detectives did the best job they could with the technology of the time. The more precise tests of the biological evidence, impossible just a few years ago, were conducted during the last six months by the Michigan State Police Forensic Science Division in Lansing, following an order by Servitto. Cooley law students and professors took on the case in May 2001, four months after a state law passed allowing DNA testing in rape convictions in which an attacker had not been conclusively established through scientific testing. Out of nearly 50 pieces of evidence, the unknown person's DNA was present in saliva on a cigarette butt, on nylons stuffed in the victim's mouth and in blood and skin scraped from beneath her fingernails. Marlinga said his office spoke for more than a half hour with the forensic scientists who tested the evidence trying to determine if there was any explanation for findings that exonerate Wyniemko scientifically. |
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