The lying #@&@
's name is not even spelled out in the news report below.
She sent away a good man for 10 years to a living Hell. His name has been
besmirched forever and his tormented life ruined until the day he dies. A
lawsuit for false imprisonment is worth One Billion Dollars if I sit on the
award jury. Lodi, California should pay until doomsday for this atrocity.
DNA frees Lodi man from prison
By Layla Bohm
News-Sentinel Staff Writer
After spending nearly 10 years in prison for a rape conviction, a Lodi man
walked free Friday when DNA evidence cleared him of the crime.
Peter Rose
In November 1995, a jury convicted Peter Joseph Rose, now 36, of raping a
13-year-old Woodbridge Middle School girl. He was sentenced to 27 years in
state prison.
But on Friday a San Joaquin County judge overturned the conviction, citing
new results of DNA evidence from the crime scene. The results showed that
there was no link between Rose and the DNA -- retrieved from the semen
found on the girl's underwear -- and he was released from Mule Creek State
Prison the same day.
Rose's family picked him up from the Ione prison Friday afternoon,
according to Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of
Corrections.
Harry Hudson, Rose's defense attorney during trial, welcomed the news
Friday evening.
"Every now and then I'd wonder (about the appellate case). I knew they
were moving through the state process. I'd say, 'I hope Pete gets out this
time.' I'm glad something finally got done. I'm just sad he had to spend
10 years in a jail cell," he said by telephone from Monterey.
Throughout the highly publicized case, Rose maintained his innocence,
sobbing when he was sentenced for rape, forced oral copulation, kidnapping
and lewd acts with a child.
Initial DNA tests in 1995 had been inconclusive, and an appeals court
confirmed the conviction in 1997.
But then the Northern California Innocence Project, based at Golden Gate
University in San Francisco, took on the case in late 2002.
Using semen taken from the girl's underwear at the time of the crime,
tests proved that it did not match Rose's DNA.
Despite prosecutors' requests that Rose simply be freed while they
investigated the evidence, Judge Stephen Demetras overturned the entire
conviction Friday.
The fight to exonerate wrongly convicted criminals is slow work, and the
Innocence Project hasn't seen many convictions overturned in the past 10
years, said Naresh Rajan, a law student and research assistant with the
Innocence Project at Santa Clara University Law School. The law schools
work together to help prisoners who claim they are innocent.
"It's very hard; you have to show that the case turned on an issue of
identity," he said.
That's what happened in Rose's case.
Prosecutors still think there's some doubt, though they acknowledge that
DNA evidence is solid.
"I don't think the fact that there's a semen stain on this girl's
underwear means definitely that this (different) guy committed the crime.
All it means is that the girl had sex with someone else around the time
the rape was committed," said Deputy District Attorney Brian Short, who
oversees the Child Abuse and Sexual Assault unit.
His office could take Rose back to trial, but Short acknowledged that it
would likely be difficult.
Short said Friday that he could not immediately locate the girl, who would
now be 23. Investigators would also have to find the girl's boyfriend from
that time and question him, Short said. And they would also have to find a
man Rose's then defense attorney believed committed the crime.
The rape allegedly happened the morning of Nov. 29, 1994, when the girl
was walking to a bus stop. She testified in court that her assailant
dragged her into an alley behind the 400 block of Eden Street, punched her
and raped her, according to News-Sentinel accounts of the preliminary
hearing and trial.
Jurors were shown photos of her bloodied nose and lip.
The assault made headline and television news, and Mayor Larry Hansen, who
was police chief at the time of Rose's arrest, remembers the case resulted
in speaking to students about walking to and from school. He could not
recall details of the investigation and declined to comment Friday.
Lodi Unified School District sponsored state legislation increasing
penalties for attacks on students heading to and from school. The bill was
carried by then-Assemblyman and current state Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden.
The girl waited three weeks to identify Rose as the suspect, with whom she
was acquainted through her aunt. The aunt was friends with Rose's
girlfriend. At trial, Hudson argued that the girl's aunt had pressured her
to blame Rose.
"I always felt that there was something there that was driving it, but it
was just outside of reach. It's like having a nightmare and you're
reaching for the door, and the door keeps fading away from you. I really
felt bad when the jury came back with that verdict," Hudson said.
Rose's girlfriend, Tamera Herrera, the mother of his two children,
maintained his innocence when she testified at trial, according to
newspaper archives.
His mother has been caring for the children for several years his aunt,
Cornelia Veldhuizen, of Lodi, said Friday evening.
The records from the three-week trial stand, and if prosecutors decided to
take Rose back to trial, they would have to figure out some
inconsistencies, Short said.
According to trial testimony, the girl took a shower that morning, put on
clean clothes, and the assault happened soon after she left for school.
Prosecutors would have to explain why they were prosecuting Rose, even
though DNA from the girl's underwear did not match Rose.
Given the DNA evidence, Short said he thought it was the right decision to
release Rose from prison, though he had wanted more time before the
conviction was thrown out.
Short stood by the work of investigators and prosecutors, though.
"If we'd had this information back in '94, we'd have taken the same steps.
Would we have charged the guy? No, we would have waited until we knew for
sure," he said.
News-Sentinel reporter Jennifer Pearson Bonnett contributed to this report.
Contact reporter Layla Bohm at layla@lodinews.com.
