DNA exoneration starts with Innocence Project gatekeeper
Huy Dao plays a reluctant 'god' to hopeful prisoners
from the August 6, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
But mainly, he read mail. Serious mail: thousands of heart-wrenching stories from convicted criminals serving long, or life, sentences – or even sitting on death row. Penned in quasi-calligraphy or pecked out on old typewriters, sent on everything from personal letterhead to toilet paper, pleas can be as simple as, "Help me, I'm innocent," or as complex as a 35-page handwritten life story. Sometimes they're accompanied by biological samples or gifts as strange as a mail-order bride catalog with a Japanese DNA biologist circled.
Dao's job: Weigh stories of wrongful conviction of heinous crimes – "a full range of horrors" including sexual assaults and murders – and winnow out those with a claim of innocence that could be proven by DNA testing. Those selected become clients of the project, which hunts down crime-scene evidence, pushes for DNA testing, and helps exonerate those proved innocent.
An English major with no legal training, Dao relies on – of all things – his appreciation of poetry to bring to light new aspects of a case that a police officer or jury may have overlooked. It's a poetic license of sorts that takes him beyond literal, legalistic meanings.
For Bruce Godschalk, Dao's knack for new meaning meant hope. Mr. Godschalk's case didn't look promising: A relative had identified him as the man in a composite sketch drawn by one of two rape victims; Godschalk had even confessed to both rapes. But Dao knew DNA would prove whether he was innocent. It took years to win the right to DNA testing; when they did, Dao was the only one available to go take Godschalk's DNA sample.
It was Dao's first visit to a prison. It smelled like school lunch, he remembers, and bulky prisoners in jumpsuits deferred to him as if he were the teacher they feared. In a sterile room, he swabbed the inside of Godschalk's mouth and while he waited for the sample to dry, he listened. Godschalk – alone in the world, chasing exoneration – saw Dao as his ticket to freedom. At their parting, Godschalk sought assurance that the test would come out in his favor. Dao says the moment was an epiphany: It struck him that it wasn't his job to be a God-like judge. The test alone could determine innocence.
And it did. Godschalk was exonerated in his 15th year of a 10- to 20-year sentence. Released from a Pennsylvania prison on Valentine's Day, 2002, he had virtually nothing and no one, so he came to New York where Dao and Ms. Potkin were. They knew every detail of his case, but now they found themselves worrying: What was his waist size? Was he going to blast his ears out with that new CD player?
• • •
RSS feed
