Note: The following article was originally published in the Arkansas Times on February 2, 2011. It remains required reading for those interested in learning about Tim’s case.
A petition now before the Arkansas Supreme Court presents evidence that the DNA analysis that helped sentence a Little River County man to death was riddled with problems, including contamination. Moreover, the petition claims that state officials knew about the errors before Tim Howard’s trial but withheld the information, in violation of state and federal laws.
Included in the petition are copies of handwritten notes made by the laboratory technician who ran the DNA tests and who testified at Howard’s trial. The notes, printed on lab reports spanning three months in 1999, contain phrases such as: “cap had flipped open while spinning,” “source of the problem,” “gel did not run properly,” “inadvertently erased,” and “random, spurious contaminant.”
Yet none of this emerged at Howard’s trial. Instead, the technician who conducted the DNA analysis — and who wrote those notes — testified without hesitation that Howard’s DNA “matched” evidence from the crime.
The case against Howard was circumstantial at best. The technician’s testimony was the strongest evidence presented linking Howard to the murders of his two close friends and to the attempted murder of their child.
Howard was convicted of the 1998 murders. He has resided on Arkansas’s Death Row ever since.”
Read the full article here.