LAST month, Steven Barnes was of the rape and murder of a 16-year-old New York schoolgirl in 1985. Barnes had been convicted of these crimes on the basis of forensic evidence, including testimony that soil on his truck tyres matched that at the crime scene. An imprint on the outside of his truck also supposedly matched the pattern of the jeans the victim was wearing when she was killed. But this year, tests showed that DNA samples from the murdered girl’s body and clothing did not match Barnes’s, and he was freed after spending 20 years in jail.
The…
