State Attorney Ignores Science, Impedes Starks’ Full Exoneration

Four months after former Illinois inmate Bennie Starks was exonerated of a rape conviction that DNA evidence proves he did not commit, the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office continues to fight efforts to exonerate him of a battery conviction from the same crime. A column by Eric Zorn in today’s Chicago Tribune says 22-year veteran State’s Attorney Michael Waller has a penchant for ignoring scientific evidence and is inclined to develop peculiar theories.

 

The victim, now deceased, testified that she was attacked and raped by the same man. Earlier this summer, an appeals court ruled that the DNA evidence undermines Starks’ battery conviction and sent it back to the trial court. Waller didn’t see it that way and petitioned the court for a rehearing.

Prosecutors argued in court that the traces of semen must have come from an earlier sexual partner of the victim and been present due to her “bad hygiene.”

 

The problem with this new theory was that the sample was fresh — no more than 30 hours old according to expert trial testimony — and the victim was on record that she hadn’t had sex with anyone for at least three days prior to the attack.

Zorn cites other cases in which Waller’s office has exhibited a preference for outlandish theories over solid scientific evidence.

Juan Rivera convicted in the 1992 rape and murder of 11-year-old Holly Stoker in Waukegan. When testing excluded Rivera as the source of DNA found in the victim, prosecutors under Waller argued that the little girl had consensual sex with a never-identified boyfriend prior to the attack.

 

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Jerry Hobbs arrested and held without bond in the 2005 slaying of his daughter Laura, 8, and her friend Krystal Tobias, 9, in a Zion park. In 2007, when DNA testing of semen found in his daughter excluded Hobbs, the Walleristas insisted that Laura must have been playing near where a couple had had sex, gotten semen on her fingers and wiped it on herself.

Read the full column

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Write the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office and

ask them to vacate the battery charge against Bennie Starks

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