Anderson v. State

• Decision Date: 04 September 2003
• Docket Number: No. 641, No. 19, No. 2002, No. 2003., No. 710
• Citation: 831 A.2d 858
• Parties: Henry J. ANDERSON, Defendant Below, Appellant, v. STATE of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee. Isaac Redding, Defendant Below, Appellant, v. State of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee. John A. Woods, Defendant Below, Appellant, v. State of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee.
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Delaware

831 A.2d 858

Henry J. ANDERSON, Defendant Below, Appellant, v. STATE of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee.

Isaac Redding, Defendant Below, Appellant, v. State of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee.

John A. Woods, Defendant Below, Appellant, v. State of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee.

Nos. 710, 2002, 641, , 2003.

Supreme Court of Delaware.

Submitted: June 16, 2003.

Decided: September 4, 2003.

As to Anderson:

Dean C. Delcollo (argued) and Lisa M. Schwind, Office of the Public Defender, Wilmington, DE, for Appellant.

Paul Wallace (argued), Office of the Attorney General, Wilmington, DE, and Kim Ayvazian, Office of the Attorney General, Georgetown, DE, for Appellee.

As to Redding:

William T. Deely, Office of the Public Defender, Wilmington, DE, for Appellant.

Loren C. Meyers, Office of the Attorney General, Wilmington, DE, for Appellee.

As to Woods:

Sandra W. Dean, Office of the Public Defender, Dover, DE and Lisa M. Schwind, Office of the Public Defender, Wilmington, DE, for Appellant.

John Williams, Office of the Attorney General, Dover, DE, for Appellee.

Before VEASEY, Chief Justice, HOLLAND, BERGER, STEELE, and JACOBS, Justices, constituting the Court en banc.

BERGER, J.:

I. INTRODUCTION

Over the past 15 years, scientific evidence from deoxyribonucleic acid ("DNA") testing has become an increasingly important feature of many criminal cases. First found admissible in Delaware in State v. Pennell,¹ DNA testing may be dispositive in determining whether or not a particular individual was the source of a particular sample of biological material.² But some criminal defendants were tried and convicted before DNA testing was available, or before DNA testing techniques were sufficiently advanced to allow analysis of a small or somewhat degraded biological sample. To address the possibility that DNA testing could help establish a convicted defendant's innocence, more than half the states in the nation, including Delaware, have enacted statutes providing prisoners the right to post-conviction DNA testing under certain circumstances.³ To date, such post-conviction testing has led to the exoneration of over one hundred convicted defendants in other jurisdictions.⁴

Delaware's statute, enacted in 2000, sets forth six criteria governing inmates' entitlement to post-conviction DNA testing. For those who were convicted before the statute was enacted, there was a two-year window during which motions for DNA testing could be timely filed. That window expired on September 1, 2002, and appears to have precipitated numerous motions. The three cases that have been consolidated in this opinion are the first to reach this Court for review. We consider them together in order to address several substantive and procedural issues associated with this new statute.

II. FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

A. Anderson v. State

On January 7, 1995, Robert Kyelberg was sitting in his truck on the corner of 7th and Washington Streets in Wilmington, Delaware, when a stranger suddenly climbed into the vehicle and put his hand on Kyelberg's right vest pocket. During the struggle that followed, Kyelberg's eye-glasses were knocked off, and the two men fell out through the truck door. While fighting, Kyelberg noticed a screwdriver and glove fall to the ground. Eventually, Kyelberg managed to climb back into his truck and lock the door. Once the assailant realized that the doors were locked, he left.

Kyelberg drove to a gas station, and the attendant called the police. When the police arrived, Kyelberg described his assailant as a black male wearing blue jeans and a dark jacket, and carrying a screwdriver and a pair of work gloves. Kyelberg warned that he would be unable to provide a positive identification, however, because his glasses had been knocked off.

The police went to the area of the assault, and saw a man, later identified as Henry J. Anderson, who matched Kyelberg's description. When the police detained Anderson, he threw a pair of work gloves to the ground. The police seized the gloves, as well as a screwdriver that Anderson was carrying. As the police were arresting Anderson, they noticed blood on Anderson's face and on his boots.

Anderson's boots, work gloves, and screwdriver were sent to an F.B.I. laboratory in Washington, D.C., where they were subjected to a form of DNA testing known as restriction fragment length polymorphism ("RFLP") testing. The results were inconclusive. Special Agent Michael Vick, of the F.B.I., testified that the likely reason for the inconclusive results was either that there was not a large enough sample, or that the blood was degraded. Before Anderson's first trial, in 1996, he was given the opportunity to obtain further testing of the blood samples, but that opportunity also included a risk. As his lawyer explained:

[P]erhaps if further testing would result in exculpatory evidence, then that would be the only reason why the defense would perhaps wish to have further testing done.

And that is Mr. Anderson's call.

Perhaps, it could turn around and bite him as well ... so that's a decision Mr. Anderson would have to make....

Anderson decided to forego further testing, and was convicted of attempted robbery in the first degree.

In August 2002, Anderson filed a motion for post-conviction DNA testing. Anderson claimed that short tandem repeat ("STR") DNA testing was not "widely available" at the time of his initial trial, and that STR testing is capable of returning reliable results even from blood samples that are small or degraded. The trial court denied Anderson's motion, finding that he failed to show: (1) that the technology was unavailable at the time of the trial; (2) that the samples had been subject to a chain of custody sufficient to establish that they were not substituted, degraded, or altered in any material aspect; or (3) that the requested testing had the scientific potential to produce new, noncumulative evidence materially relevant to his assertion of actual innocence.

B. Redding v. State

At approximately 2:00 a.m. on May 18, 1988, an intruder forced his way into Diana Wendell's⁵ apartment building and raped her. After the attack, the assailant warned Wendell not to contact the police and then left the apartment. Wendell immediately went to her bathroom to clean herself up. In that process, she threw away the underwear she had been wearing. Later that morning, Wendell went to the police station. Because the rape took place in dim lighting, however, Wendell was unable to describe her assailant beyond noting that he had a scar across his face. Approximately three months later, a man again forced his way into Wendell's apartment. The two struggled, and Wendell managed to call for help through an open window before the intruder pulled her away from the window. He identified himself as the assailant from the previous assault by telling her that he would "fuck [her] like he did the first time."

Eric Lloyd was passing by Wendell's apartment and happened to hear her scream. He called the police and remained on the scene. The intruder had forced Wendell to perform various sexual acts, and was attempting vaginal intercourse when the police burst through the back door of Wendell's apartment. The intruder ran out through the front door, but the responding officers gave chase and captured the fleeing man, later identified as Isaac Redding, on the street outside.

One of the pursuing officers, Officer Strawbridge, testified that he never lost sight of Redding from the time he first saw Redding in Wendell's apartment to the time he apprehended Redding outside the building. In addition, the passerby, who was watching from the street, testified that he saw a man run out the front door of Wendell's building, and then saw a police officer follow and apprehend him. Wendell also identified Redding, when shown photographs shortly after the second attack. She stated that the person she identified from the photograph was the same person who had attacked her in May.

At trial, Redding testified that he had known Wendell's husband for approximately fifteen years, and that he had met Wendell — thus explaining why she was drawn to his picture in the photo lineup. His alibi for the first attack was that he was babysitting the daughter of Lana Hickman at the time. Hickman, Redding's girlfriend, corroborated his testimony. With respect to the second attack, Redding testified that he had been drinking alcohol with friends approximately seven blocks from Wendell's apartment. When he noticed how late it was, he decided to run home along a path that brought him near Wendell's apartment. As he was running, a police officer jumped him.

The jury convicted Redding on all charges and he was sentenced to four life terms. In June 2002, Redding filed a motion seeking DNA testing of two slides containing vaginal material taken from Wendell during the investigation of the two attacks. The trial court denied his motion, finding that the requested testing did not have the scientific potential to produce new, noncumulative evidence materially relevant to Redding's assertion of actual innocence.

C. Woods v. State

On November 5, 1995, Laura Woods called the police to report that her daughter, Rebecca⁶, had been sexually molested by her husband, Rebecca's father, John Woods. The same day, a police officer interviewed Rebecca and she recounted multiple molestations. As a result, John Woods was arrested and charged with 37 counts of unlawful sexual intercourse in the first degree, 32 counts of unlawful sexual contact in the second degree, and 3 counts of unlawful sexual penetration in the third degree.

At trial, Rebecca testified to numerous instances of sexual abuse by her father. In her testimony, she stated that he occasionally would have intercourse with her in her bed, and occasionally would ejaculate outside her vagina and onto her stomach. Rebecca testified that, during the period of abuse, Woods...