Maine woman helps set free man wrongfully convicted

PORTLAND – A Portland-based advocate for prison inmates has been credited with helping to free a man who was wrongly convicted 16 years ago in New York of raping and murdering a 15-year-old classmate.

Jeffrey Deskovic, 33, was released Wednesday after a new DNA test implicated another man and the new suspect confessed.

After several appeals, Deskovic contacted Claudia Whitman, who helped him get a lawyer to prove that he did not kill Angela Correa, a classmate at Peekskill High School. Additional DNA tests then were taken, which matched samples from another man already serving a life sentence in New York.

Whitman, a longtime prisoner advocate who heads the nonprofit National Death Row Assistance Network, said Deskovic’s release was a team effort.

The New York City-based Innocence Project, which handles cases in which post-conviction DNA testing might yield proof of innocence, persuaded Westchester District Attorney Janet DiFiore to use a new type of DNA test on remaining sperm samples. The resulting genetic fingerprint was then checked against the FBI’s DNA database, which did not exist at the time of the killing.

“The prosecutor got behind it and said, ‘let’s go for it,’ and when they went into the database, they already had the person who had committed this horrible crime. So, it’s just a wonderful thing when it works,” Whitman told WCSH-TV, Portland.

After his release, Deskovic said he might become a lawyer or a psychotherapist and was writing a book titled, “Inside the Mind of the Wrongfully Convicted.”