Free Republic

Something happened in the middle of Samuel Alito's triumphant hearings in the Senate last week that shouldn't be allowed to slip by. On Thursday, just as the hearings were winding up, results came back from a Toronto laboratory that DNA testing had affirmed once again that Roger Keith Coleman, executed in 1992 by Virginia for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law, was indeed guilty of the crime.

DNA testing that may finally put to rest the guilt or innocence of Roger Keith Coleman is possible only because of a forensic scientist on the other side of the country. That is because Virginia authorities cannot find the original evidence from the 1981 rape and murder that led to Coleman's 1992 execution. State law at the time allowed the destruction of evidence after initial appeals were over. But Coleman's case was one of the most contentious and high-profile in the modern history of the death penalty in the United States. And the evidence was still intact at least nine...

RICHMOND, Va. - Gov. Mark R. Warner on Thursday ordered DNA evidence retested to determine whether a man convicted of rape and murder was innocent when he was executed in 1992. If the testing shows Roger Keith Coleman did not rape and kill his sister-in-law in 1981, it will be the first time in the United States a person has been exonerated by scientific testing after his execution, according to death penalty opponents. Warner said he ordered the tests because of technological advances that could provide a level of forensic certainty not available in the 1980s. "This is an extraordinarily...