September 4, 2009

Kim Gorman checked and rechecked the test results in her Columbia lab. There was no doubt: They locked up the wrong guy. It wasn’t Johnny Briscoe who raped and robbed a woman at knifepoint in her apartment.
Cigarette butts from the crime scene, stored away and forgotten in a St. Louis Police Department crime lab, were tested for DNA. The saliva came from an acquaintance who framed Briscoe.
Twenty-three years after being wrongfully convicted of rape, after spending nearly half his life in a Missouri prison, Johnny Briscoe was set free in 2006.