Los Angeles Times; January 24, 1993

Nearly 6 Years Later, DNA Test Frees Wrongly Convicted Man : Forensics: The criminal justice systems hails genetic identification analysis as the most powerful tool since fingerprinting.

BEN DOBBIN - ASSOCIATED PRESS

The victim said she was positive he was the rapist. The jury took one hour to convict. And the judge put Lennie Callace away for 25 to 50 years.

Nearly six years later, the 38-year-old father of four is back home in a crumbling Brooklyn neighborhood called "The Hole," finally getting even with his anger.

What convinced the criminal justice system that they had the wrong man was DNA analysis--hailed as the most powerful forensic tool since fingerprinting. It first was submitted as evidence in a U.S. courtroom in October, 1987, eight months after Callace "went to trial for justice and found there was no justice."

Thousands of police investigations have either been dropped or resolved on the basis of genetic identification. And now DNA is being put to a more dramatic use--to overturn wrongful convictions.

In the last two years, in cases where blood, semen, tissue, saliva or bone marrow from the crime scene has been preserved, it has become the final arbiter in setting free at least a dozen men imprisoned around the country for rape.

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule in the nucleus of body cells that forms patterns different for each individual except identical twins. The technique of matching DNA in blood samples can also be used to determine parentage.

"I'm glad for that stuff," said Callace, whose indictment was dismissed Oct. 19. "It's going to save the taxpeople's money and save a lot of heartaches."

So far, freedom hasn't been so easy for him to grasp.

Callace can hardly bear to dwell on how Lennie Jr., 15, Frank, 10, Sal, 8, and Elizabeth, 7, have grown up without their father. How his girlfriend "did the bird on me," deciding she couldn't wait for a parole hearing in October, 2006. And how his mother, Delores, grieved over her favorite son until her death from cancer in 1990.

He wasn't permitted to attend her funeral.

"That was my heart, my mother, and I couldn't be there for her," Callace said, struggling not to cry. "She's resting now. She knows I'm home.

"I'm just glad it's over with," he added, "but I've got a lot of hate, frustration. I'm not right. I snap. Last night, I had to go for a walk--two o'clock for a walk!"

Callace, a sometime cabdriver, construction worker and petty thief, was picked up in July, 1986, and charged with sexually assaulting and sodomizing an 18-year-old nursing-home aide at knifepoint in the parking lot of a shopping center in Selden, on Long Island, in January, 1985.

Callace's parents had moved to Long Island in 1973 and their son often visited. So when he missed a court appearance for stealing hub caps, detectives on Long Island were asked to help locate him.

Instead, after noting his description, the detectives snatched Callace at gunpoint outside a corner store in July, 1986. The woman picked him out of a line-up as the man who raped her.

Eighteen months earlier, she had described the rapist as 5-foot-10 or taller, with reddish-blond afro-style hair, a full beard and a cross tattoo on his left hand. Callace is 5-foot-8, has straight blond hair and a goatee he's always kept tightly trimmed, and a tiny cross on his right hand.

The case was weak, and prosecutors offered a deal: Plead guilty and serve just four more months. Callace's Legal Aid lawyer pressed him to accept. An incensed Callace said no.

At the trial, the defense failed to mention that hair found on the woman's sweater was not Callace's; that eyewitness identification is widely considered to be the least reliable form of evidence; that another suspect was eliminated after revealing he was circumcised--Callace also is circumcised.

Her testimony was compelling, and the verdict was guilty on all six counts.

"I had to sit down," Callace said. "I turned to my brother and said, 'What's going on here?' "

Callace's current lawyer, Thomas McVann, is more blunt: "Lennie was railroaded. I am sure they put pressure on her. It's a suggestive process."

In maximum-security at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Upstate New York, Callace said he worked 16 hours a day in the tailor shop, sewing inmate uniforms. His redemption was to befriend a jailhouse lawyer in 1989, when DNA testing was becoming more common.

The legal system lacks guidelines even today on how DNA should be reconsidered, and Callace's request for a test of a semen stain on the woman's blue jeans was denied.

But two years later, Charles Dabbs, a New York inmate convicted of rape, successfully sought a DNA test and was cleared.

Suffolk County Judge John Vaughn allowed a private lab to compare the genetic makeup in Callace's blood to DNA in the semen. The test came back negative.

But with freedom, sleep doesn't come easily. He won't travel anywhere alone. He's wound up like a steel coil, smoking 1 1/2 packs a day, his hawk-like face florid from high blood pressure.

Some days, Callace is with his brother, Pierre, chimney-cleaning. But on weekends, he's back "down The Hole," a basin-shaped, Italian-American enclave where he grew up.

"I live day by day," Callace said, sipping coffee in a family friend's threadbare kitchen. "Yesterday is history. I ain't changed except my marbles are a little loose."

"Am I normal, Val?" he asks his friend.

"Half and half," says Valerie Gallo, smiling, squeezing his shoulder.

Callace points to a house where he plans to move--the top room with the cracked pane. He ambles up the hill with his eldest son, pointing out the white brick house where his family lived. He calls out to a neighbor, Sam Amico, who asks him into his dilapidated home for a cup of wine.

"They treat me the same," Callace says of his neighbors. "I came home in a big stretch limo. They seen me and they went crazy."

Later, thoughts turn to his accuser. "I forgive her but I'm still mad at her," he said. "The cops pumped her so bad she believed them."

The woman's lawyer, David Grossman, denied that police pressured her.

"She has absolutely no comment about the DNA test," he said.

More than 10,000 DNA tests have been performed since 1987. About 30% of the 6,000-plus DNA tests done by the FBI show there is not a match, said John W. Hicks, assistant director in charge of its laboratory in Washington.

New York attorney Barry Scheck predicted that there'll be "hundreds and hundreds of cases" in which convicts make use of DNA "to be freed for crimes they didn't commit." But he warned, "There's a real need to regulate private DNA laboratories to make sure they're reliable."

Scheck helped defend Kerry Kotler, 34, whose conviction for raping a Long Island housewife was reversed Dec. 1 after DNA tests showed there was more than a reasonable doubt of his guilt. Kotler had served 11 years in prison.

Callace could get "maybe a million dollars" in a year under a state law for compensating people who are wrongly convicted, his lawyer said.

It doesn't seem real, like much else, and Callace's plans are tentative--crabbing on the Rockaways, a week's vacation in Hawaii, buying a small house.

Then he breaks into a smile.

"Ain't nobody going to stop me now."