This archive report was first published on 26 June 2020.
On June 5, 2020, a hearing took place that would change the course of a murder case in Louisiana. Mr. Singer, an advocate for the wrongly accused, and Suzanna Ryan, an independent DNA analyst, presented their findings to the court. Their investigation had revealed a shocking truth: a DNA mix-up involving a washing machine had led to a man being wrongly accused of murder and kept in jail for three years.
The case began in October 2019, when Mr. Singer spoke to Winnie Kurowski, a forensic chemist at the Acadiana Criminalistics lab. Prosecutors had claimed that a knife marked as item 16 was used to slit the victim's throat and stab him multiple times. However, Ms. Kurowski revealed that the knife did not contain even a drop of the victim's blood.
Mr. Singer shared the paperwork with Ms. Ryan, who suspected a switch and asked to retest the samples. At Pure Gold Forensics, a private lab in Redlands, Calif., she found that the only identifiable source of the DNA on the washing machine swab was not the victim, as the paperwork suggested, but Ms. King, Mr. Verret's girlfriend. This made sense because they lived together. The only identifiable source of DNA on the knife was the victim, a detail missing from the paperwork.
At the hearing, Mr. Singer confronted Ms. Kurowski, citing the Acadiana Criminalistics report that said, with 99.9 percent certainty, that the DNA from the swab taken from Mr. Verret's washing machine was from Mr. Poche. “We can just toss this in the garbage until you do some retesting, right?” he said.
“Yes,” Ms. Kurowski replied, according to a transcript.
On June 8, 2020, the prosecution dismissed the charges and Mr. Verret was released from jail.
