Nearly three decades ago, Donald Gates was convicted of raping and murdering a college student in Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park. The evidence against him consisted largely of testimony from a paid government informant and two hairs found on the victim that supposedly matched Gates’ own.
On Tuesday, both prosecutors and defense lawyers will ask a District of Columbia judge to release Gates from prison after recent DNA testing showed "resounding" proof of his innocence.
According to court papers filed last week by the D.C. Public Defender Service, a laboratory found that the DNA of semen found inside the victim after the crime did not match Gates’ genetic code. Prosecutors had claimed that in June of 1981 Gates attempted to rob 21-year-old Catherine Schilling on her way home from work. When she resisted, they said, he raped her, then shot her in the head.
A special FBI agent, Michael Malone, told jurors that two pubic hairs found on Schilling’s body were “microscopically identical” to a sample taken from Gates. Prosecutors also presented testimony from a convicted felon who claimed Gates’ confessed the crime to him shortly after it occurred. Finally, another woman testified that Gates had also tried to rob her in the park 19 days before the murder.
According to Gates’ lawyers — PDS attorneys Sandra Levick, Parisa Dehgani-Tafti and Katherine Philpott — it later surfaced that Malone had given false testimony in a series of murder cases across the country. He was singled out in a report by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, and his record was the subject of a a Wall Street Journal investigation. Malone later admitted to giving false testimony during a death penalty case in Florida, the defense wrote.
During a review of Malone’s work, the Justice Department asked the District’s U.S. Attorney’s Office to look at the Gates’ case. In 2003, a forensic scientist found that Malone’s lab report was not supported by his notes. Defense lawyers claim those findings were passed on to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, but never were revealed to Gates’ counsel.
Gates maintained his innocence throughout his imprisonment. And although earlier DNA testing in Gates’ case proved inconclusive, a judge granted his motion for new tests in November.
“[I]t is scientifically impossible for Mr. Gates to have left the sperm found on the vaginal slides,” the defense filing states. “The conclusion is inescapable: Mr. Gates was not the perpetrator.”
In a response dated yesterday, U.S. Attorney’s Office said its special proceedings division never received the report on Malone’s work, and that it was investigating the matter. Robert Okun, chief of the special proceeding division, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Joan Draper asked that Gates be released pending further testing to make sure the recently tested DNA belonged to him and Schilling.
Comments