Citing new DNA evidence, a Pennsylvania judge on Thursday overturned the murder convictions of three men known as the “Chester Trio” who have been imprisoned for nearly 25 years for a crime they say they did not commit, CNN reports.
According to the report by CNN, Chester Trio of Derrick Chappell, 41, Morton Johnson, 44, and Samuel Grasty, 47, were each convicted in separate trials of second-degree murder and other charges in 2000 and 2001, and sentenced to life in prison for the 1997 killing of Henrietta Nickens, 70, in Chester, Pennsylvania.
Yet they have maintained their innocence over the two decades they’ve been imprisoned.
Last year, the “Chester Trio” asked a judge to throw out their convictions and order new trials, citing new DNA evidence they say points to an unknown man as the killer. Prosecutors, though, fought to keep the three behind bars and uphold the convictions, saying the DNA evidence did not change anything already known at the time of their trials.
In Thursday’s ruling, Delaware County Judge Mary Alice Brennan sided with the trio, vacating the convictions and granting their request for a new trial.
The ruling is a vindication of their long protests of innocence, said Paul Casteleiro, an attorney with Centurion who represents Grasty.
“This order means so much in that it says this court believes that these guys would be acquitted, they’re innocent,” Casteleiro told CNN. “That’s powerful after all these years of knocking on the door and being denied everywhere they went.”
In exchange for his testimony, McElwee agreed to plead guilty to third-degree murder and other charges and was sentenced to six to 12 years in 1999, according to court records.
The defendants’ petition for a new trial came after new DNA testing, which took place in 2021, further linked evidence from the crime scene to the unknown male and excluded the three defendants, according to Chappell’s attorneys.
Modern DNA testing techniques, particularly “touch DNA,” revealed the DNA from the semen matches several other items of crime scene evidence, including more semen on the green jacket and on the bedsheet and items in the jacket’s pocket, according to attorneys for the defendants.
Timothy Palmbach, an expert in crime scene reconstruction, testified in a Delaware County courtroom last August about the new DNA evidence, in particular a mixture of the unknown man’s semen, the victim’s blood, and urine on her bedsheet. The commingling of those bodily fluids shows the beating and sex occurred at about the same time, he testified, rebutting a key prosecution argument they were unrelated.
The mixture “fundamentally changes the nature of the crime scene and the conclusion to be drawn from it,” Palmbach said in court and wrote in a forensic report.
However, the prosecution argued their initial trials did not connect the semen to the defendants, and so these test results did not change the evidence. The prosecution also raised the possibility the 70-year-old may have had a secret sexual partner.
“The totality of the evidence – including the post-conviction DNA evidence – is just as consistent, if not more consistent, with Ms. Nickens having consensual intercourse prior to the assault as it is with an unknown perpetrator committing both a rape and an assault,” prosecutors wrote.