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With New DNA Evidence, LAS Reaffirms Fight to Exonerate Client Who Spent 26 Years Incarcerated

The Legal Aid Society called on the Queens District Attorney’s Office to immediately consent to a recently filed vacatur motion regarding the case of Michael Robinson – a Legal Aid client who served 26 years of incarceration for a 1993 murder conviction – after the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) generated new a DNA result excluding Mr. Robinson as the source of the male DNA found under the fingernails of the decedent, Gwendolyn Samuels, reports NY1.

“You get to before the jury that underneath the fingernails of the deceased is DNA evidence and the results are that it’s 78 trillion times more likely that it is not Mr. Robinson, absolutely the jury would be acquitting him,” said Harold Ferguson, Staff Attorney with the Criminal Appeals Bureau at The Legal Aid Society.