Twenty-five years in Illinois prisons for a rape he didn't commit gave Jerry Miller plenty of time to think about how the criminal justice system works.
It is, he decided, a lot like "a big assembly line."
"Lots of products come off, and most of the time it's OK," says Miller, set to be formally exonerated of rape, battery, robbery and kidnapping at a court hearing in Chicago today.
PACE QUICKENS: DNA to clear 200th person
"But then there's the defects, the one's that are messed up. …You got an assembly line, you're always gonna have some defects."
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Jerry Miller
The Innocence Project, a New York City-based group that uses DNA to clear persons wrongly convicted, says the 48-year-old former Army cook will be the 200th person exonerated by DNA evidence since the technology was first used to clear a convict in 1989.
DNA testing hadn't yet been used in a criminal case when Miller was convicted of the September 1981 rape, robbery, assault and kidnapping of a Chicago office worker in a parking garage north of the Loop.
The woman testified that she had been assaulted by a black man, robbed and raped in the back seat of her car before being thrown into the trunk.
The victim never got a good look at her assailant. Two lot attendants, both black, identified Miller as the man who attempted to drive the car out of the lot but fled when challenged.
A few days earlier, police had briefly detained Miller for acting suspiciously near cars parked in the area.
Miller had an alibi: He was home watching the Sugar Ray Leonard-Thomas Hearns welterweight title bout. Only family members backed up his story.
The jury didn't believe them.
"It was a high-profile case, and they basically had it in their minds to convict me from the start," he says of prosecutors.
Miller appealed his conviction, lost, then began hearing about DNA in the mid-1990s. He sought help from the public defender's office and the Innocence Project. He was paroled last year before testing could be performed on semen stains from the crime scene. Even though free, he says, he insisted on DNA testing to remove the "stigma" of the conviction and to be removed from Illinois' sex-offender registry.
In March, Miller's DNA was shown not to match the genetic profile of the rapist drawn from the crime scene. He says the number of DNA exonerations will grow because there are more innocent people in prison "than you would ever think."
"You know everybody (in prison) can't be innocent, but there's a lot of guys who say they are, and they've got pretty good cases," he says. "But so many of them get discouraged, and they give up."
The second-hardest part of living with a wrongful conviction, he says, is "sticking with your guns" by continuing to insist you're innocent.
The hardest part?
"Getting people to believe you."
Since his parole last year, Miller lives with family in a town outside Chicago, cooks part-time at a restaurant and works as an attendant on a shuttle bus that serves handicapped persons.
He has focused on having his conviction vacated, both to clear his name and to be rid of the restrictions that came with his parole. These include an order that prevents Miller from interacting with children and a Global Positioning System-based monitor that allows parole officers to monitor his whereabouts. "I know I didn't do it, but it's still important for me to hear a judge say so," Miller says. "It's like there's this weight I been carrying around for 25 years, and I'm still carrying it."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...n-inside_N.htm
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