07 May 2007 :

Jerry Miller, a former army cook who spent nearly 25 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit, became the nation's 200th person freed from prison or death row through DNA testing. The first DNA exoneration in the U.S. took place in 1989. Thirteen years later, the number of freed inmates reached 100, and just five years after that, it doubled. Barry Scheck, co-founder of the New York-based Innocence Project, assisted Miller and other prisoners seeking to prove their innocence through DNA evidence. In 1982, Miller was convicted of raping and kidnapping an office worker in a parking garage in Chicago. Miller, who is black, was identified by two parking lot attendants, who were also black. The victim, who was white, could not identify her assailant. Miller consistently maintained his innocence while he was in prison and continued to insist he was not guilty of the crime even after being paroled last year. New DNA tests performed by the Innocence Project in March 2007 showed that Miller's genetic profile differed from the rapist's, proving that he did not commit the crime. Based on this new evidence, the Cook County State Attorney's Office joined the Innocence Project and the Cook County Public Defender's Office in a joint motion to vacate and dismiss Miller's conviction.
Fourteen of the nation's 200 DNA exonerations have been death penalty cases. Most exonerations come from cases from the 1980s and 1990s, before DNA testing was available or widely used. The Innocence Project now has affiliates at law schools and law offices across the nation.