News Archive

On February 4, 2017, an episode of the CBS news program '48 Hours' will present the stories of co-defendants Darryl Pinkins and Roosevelt Glenn, highlighting more than 15 years of legal representation by the IU McKinney Wrongful Conviction Clinic to free them from wrongful imprisonment. Professor Frances Watson and clinic students became involved in the cases of Pinkins and Glenn in 1999, after receiving a referral from the Innocence Project.

Darryl Pinkins was released from prison on April 25, 2016, after 25 years, when Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter moved to vacate his convictions and dismiss the charges. Subsequent to an analysis of the evidence and the decision to agree to vacate Pinkins’ innocence, Prosecutor Carter also moved to vacate Glenn’s conviction, and that happened on January 30, 2017. Co-defendant Glenn had served his entire sentence and was released in 2009, but he remained a convicted rapist until the Lake Superior Court granted the motion to vacate Glenn’s conviction and ordered that the charges against him be dismissed. Both men were able to pursue the successive legal challenges only after receiving permission from the Indiana Court of Appeals based on claims of new DNA technology and actual innocence.

In 1989, five men committed the sexual assaults which resulted in the convictions of only Pinkins and Glenn. Despite the fact that each and every test excluded Pinkins and Glenn as having contributed to the DNA forensic evidence left on the victim’s clothes, they were convicted with a single identification by the victim, faulty hair comparison testimony, and the use of serology inclusion evidence in the face of the DNA exclusions. 

The efforts to exonerate Pinkins and Glenn finally achieved success thanks to TrueAllele technologies developed by Dr. Mark Perlin, Cybergenetics founder and chief executive. The specific goal of Dr. Perlin’s DNA technique, based on probabilistic genotyping, is to provide a reliable method to dissect complex DNA mixtures. Dr. Perlin and Professor Greg Hampikian, a geneticist with the Idaho Innocence Project, Boise State University, contributed countless pro bono hours toward the exonerations.

Scores of IU McKinney students have worked on the case through the Wrongful Conviction Clinic over the years. The show will air at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.