DNA Retest Lifts Life Sentence for Rape-Killing

New DNA testing has prompted a judge to toss out a life sentence for the man convicted in the brutal 1996 murder of an elderly woman that shook a tiny northern Michigan town.

A Circuit Court judge this week ordered a new trial for 39-year-old Jamie Lee Peterson, whose case was profiled by NBC News in December. The order was based largely on new DNA testing that implicated another man in the crime.

Prosecutors must now decide whether to retry Peterson, who remains in prison, for the brutal October 1996 rape and slaying of Geraldine Montgomery, a 68-year-old former schoolteacher, in Kalkaska, Michigan, a town of about 2,200 residents in the northern reaches of the state.

Lawyers and law students from the University of Michigans Innocence Clinic and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Michigan University were instrumental in persuading the state to retest DNA evidence using technology unavailable at the time. The new results excluded Peterson, bolstering the argument his supporters and attorneys have made for years -- that he has been imprisoned for a crime he did not commit.

"False confessions, especially by those who are cognitively impaired, are very real.

It's truly thrilling, said A.J. Dixon, a lawyer with the Michigan Innocence Clinic who first joined the legal team as a law student. This opinion is certainly a step in the right direction of correcting something that we believe went wrong 17 years ago.

Peterson was convicted in 1998 of beating and raping Montgomery in her home, then locking her in the trunk of her running Buick and leaving her to asphyxiate.

Investigators conducted scores of interviews at the time, but had few leads until a tip from a jailhouse informant led them to Peterson, then 22, who was incarcerated on a sex charge and had a history of mental illness. After a series of interrogations, Peterson confessed. He soon recanted, but was nevertheless tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

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DNA Retest Lifts Life Sentence for Rape-Killing