The Tennessee pppeals courtroom rejected Mr. Alley’s request for testing, saying he had failed to determine that “cheap chance.” The courtroom additionally rejected his argument for the crime scene DNA to be run by way of a public database to determine the true killer.
In a weird studying of the Tennessee DNA legislation, the appeals courtroom stated the legislation’s attain was restricted to evaluating the defendant’s DNA with samples of clothes and different proof. The needs of DNA testing “should stand alone,” the courtroom stated, “and don’t embody a speculative nationwide seek for the potential for a third-party perpetrator.” In different phrases, Mr. Alley was barred from DNA testing, even when it might exonerate him by figuring out another person as the one who killed Suzanne Collins.
Sedley Alley had a daughter named April. Her mom died when she was 4, and she or he grew up along with her maternal grandparents, alienated from her father. In her 20s, Ms. Alley received in contact along with her father in jail and began visiting him. Early on, she requested him if he had killed Lance Corporal Collins.
“I stated, ‘I simply need you to be sincere with me and inform me the reality. It gained’t cease me from coming to go to with you,” she advised me over the telephone this week. “He stated, ‘April, if I did this, I don’t bear in mind doing it. If it’s ever confirmed with DNA I did do that, I don’t need to struggle my execution.’” He by no means wavered from that place.
In 2006, Mr. Alley was executed by deadly injection. In 2011, in one other case through which a convicted man petitioned for DNA testing, the Tennessee Supreme Court docket dominated that the state’s DNA legislation does present for establishing innocence through the use of the check outcomes to determine “the true perpetrator of the crime.” The Tennessee Appeals Court docket had been flawed to disclaim Sedley Alley’s petition for testing. Nationally, database hits of DNA proof have recognized the precise assailant in 139 exonerations, in line with the Innocence Venture.
In 2019, one in every of Sedley Alley’s legal professionals, Kelley Henry, knocked on April Alley’s door. Ms. Henry had confirmed a tip to the Innocence Venture {that a} man who had been arrested in a homicide and two sexual assaults in St. Louis was suspected in different killings — and that shortly earlier than Lance Corporal Collins’s demise, he had been enrolled in a coaching course on the naval base the place she additionally skilled.
The knowledge persuaded Ms. Alley to resume the petition for DNA testing in her father’s case. Her father’s life couldn’t be saved, however maybe his popularity could possibly be, she reasoned. Because the consultant of her father’s property, she would stand in his sneakers, legally talking. She additionally felt a broader accountability: If the person arrested in St. Louis was responsible of the Collins homicide, “then these different individuals died or have been damage once they didn’t should be,” she advised me.