ABSTRACT
AS RECENTLY AS 1989, this would have been the end of the discussion. However, on August 14, 1989, Gary Dotson was exonerated by an emerging forensic tool: DNA analysis of crime scene evidence.1 The luckless Dotson, a high-school dropout from Chicago, had served eight years over a twelve-year period in and out of prison for a rape that was totally fabricated by the victim, Cathleen Crowell. In 1977, the sixteen-year-old Crowell, after having consensual sex with her boyfriend, invented the rape as a backup story in case she became pregnant. She fooled detectives, prosecutors, judges, and even a governor by basing her detailed story on a rape described in a novel by Rosemary Rogers, Sweet Savage Love.2 Two years later, Dotson, then twenty-two, was sentenced to a minimum of twenty-five years in prison.
