The road to freedom for Alan Newton, who spent 22 years in jail on a wrongful rape conviction before he was released last week, began in 1997 with an unlikely sit-down between then-Police Commissioner Howard Safir and DNA expert Barry Scheck.
The two had never met – and Safir didn’t much care for Scheck.
“My only thought was he was the guy who got O.J. off,” Safir recalled. “We’re quite an odd couple.”
But when they huddled in Safir’s office at Police Plaza, Scheck shocked the commissioner with news that cops had never tested more than 12,000 “rape kits” from sex-assault victims.
Safir persuaded Mayor Rudy Giuliani to shell out $12 million so outside firms could test the kits, which took three years. One of the kits contained evidence from the 1984 rape for which Newton was convicted.
Still, it took a more than a decade for police to locate that evidence.
“On Monday, we’re going to write a letter to [Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly asking for his help,” said Scheck, whose Innocence Project took up Newton’s cause. “There are 17 to 20 more cases like Newton’s where they said the evidence was lost..”