in modern times ray krone of phoenix arizona was the 100th person freed from death row when DNA testing proved he didnt commit the murder he was convicted of. im sure that 100's of people before DNA testing was invented were executed for crimes they didnt commit because they didnt have DNA testing to bail them out. im also sure there are 100's and probably 1,000's of cases like the one below where a person convicted of murder says they are innocent and they are trying to get out of jail after spending many years in jail for a crime they say they didnt commit. the judge gave ray krone extra time for refusing to admit he murdered the person he was convicted of murdering. DNA testing proved the judge was wrong. i wonder if DNA testing or new evidence will prove the judge wrong in the article below where the man has spent 16 years in prison claiming he is innocent? Original Article With Missionary Zeal, Group Fights to Free Convicted Killer in Maine Girl's Murder By PAM BELLUCK Published: November 28, 2005 PORTLAND, Me. - The Augusta chapter meets at Pat Christopher's house on the third Wednesday of every month. On the last Monday, the Madawaska chapter convenes above the police station. And on the fourth Tuesday are meetings of the Auburn-Lewiston and Freedom-Belfast chapters. Michael C. York for The New York Times Dennis Dechaine has served 16 years of a life sentence for Sarah Cherry's murder. A group called Trial and Error has rallied behind his bid for a new trial, selling books, buttons, bracelets and stickers to raise money. These are not book groups or penny poker games. At these meetings, the topic might be DNA under a murdered girl's thumbnail or the time of death in a coroner's report. And the attendees have an unusually zealous mission: freeing a man convicted 16 years ago of what many consider to be Maine's most notorious crime. The crime was the murder of 12-year-old Sarah Cherry, who was kidnapped from a baby-sitting job in Bowdoin in July 1988, taken to the woods, raped with birch sticks, tied up, strangled with a bandanna and stabbed in the throat and head. The convicted man is Dennis Dechaine (pronounced duh-SHANE), then a 30-year-old farmer and Christmas wreath vendor, seen walking from the woods hours after Sarah disappeared. Law enforcement officials remain convinced he is the killer - after all, the bandanna, knife and rope matched those he owned, a receipt and a notebook belonging to him were found in the driveway of the home where she was baby-sitting, and, according to detectives and jail guards, Mr. Dechaine confessed. "There's no evidence of somebody else being involved in this," said Eric Wright, who prosecuted the case. But Mr. Dechaine's supporters, who say they number at least 1,000 in Maine and more elsewhere, refuse to let things rest. Most of them never knew Mr. Dechaine before his conviction, and many belong to Trial and Error, a group whose sole focus is this case. It claims nine chapters in Maine and smaller ones in Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, California and Hong Kong. They have circulated petitions, urged legislation and recruited lawyers for Mr. Dechaine, who is serving a life sentence in the state prison in Warren. They have staged Dennis Dechaine Day demonstrations at the Statehouse, marching with his life-size photograph. With walkathons, bake sales and benefit concerts, they have raised $130,000 for expenses like DNA testing. They even have songs with lyrics like: "Do the right thing at least this one time/Let's free Dennis Dechaine." And one supporter, James P. Moore, a former agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, wrote a book saying the case against Mr. Dechaine was flawed, and then pressed successfully for the release of police records that Mr. Dechaine's advocates say reveal new evidence. Supporters of Mr. Dechaine, who says he was in the woods that night doing drugs, say cross-outs in police notes show he did not really confess. They stress that no fingerprints, blood or hairs tied him to the murder, to which Mr. Wright replies, "the absence of forensic evidence doesn't mean that's evidence that somebody didn't do it." John Richardson, Maine's speaker of the House, said, "I don't think I remember a case that has garnered this much attention." The House voted in May on a resolution introduced by Representative Ross Paradis, a Trial and Error member, that urged a new trial for Mr. Dechaine. The bill failed, 85 to 51. Last year, after the group generated publicity, Maine's attorney general appointed a panel to investigate prosecutorial and police conduct in the case. Its report is expected soon. And this fall, a judge was supposed to hear a retrial motion based on DNA, but Mr. Dechaine's lawyers decided they could not meet the strict conditions Maine requires for a new trial. Now, Mr. Paradis is introducing a bill to soften the retrial law. "The Trial and Error folks have been relentless," said Colin Starger, a lawyer for the Innocence Project, a legal clinic dedicated to reversing wrongful convictions. It got involved in the case years ago, partly because of a call from Trial and Error. Mr. Starger said cases almost never spawned large groups of supporters with no relationship to the defendant, and he said that he sometimes kept his distance. "They've created controversy, and controversy always has the benefit of keeping an issue alive, but sometimes has the downside of dividing people into camps," he said, "and then there's a camp that is strongly against you." M. Michaela Murphy, Mr. Dechaine's lead lawyer, recruited by the group in 2003, said, "Trial and Error makes my life hard." "They have their own agenda, which I often don't agree with," she added. "I think they're nave in the extreme about the possibilities of publicly advocating for a person like Mr. Dechaine. Someone from the group tried to actually contact the family of Sarah Cherry, and I pretty much had a coronary." The group has since tried to tone things down, ousting the member who went to Sarah's grandparents' house and visited one of her sisters at the restaurant where she worked. These days, members are selling cookbooks and urging Maine movie theaters to show a new film about exonerated inmates as a way to build support for Mr. Dechaine. The Rev. Robert Dorr, the Cherry family's pastor and spokesman, said the Dechaine supporters' persistence "boils down to abuse" and said the family could not "come to terms with their grieving when these people are always in their face." It started after Mr. Dechaine's conviction in 1989, when Carol Waltman, who knew him in Madawaska, in French-Canadian northern Maine, founded Trial and Error. Ms. Waltman, who had had medical problems, said "God kept me alive for a reason, to help Dennis." When he sought a new trial in 1992, one of several unsuccessful legal moves, Trial and Error bused in 90 supporters in "slime green" T-shirts who gave Mr. Dechaine a standing ovation in the courtroom, Ms. Waltman said. Later, with money Trial and Error raised at a dance, Mr. Dechaine's lawyer had Sarah's fingernails tested for DNA, something Mr. Dechaine had requested before his trial but had been denied. Blood under a thumbnail contained DNA of another man, still unidentified. The state confirmed those results last year. Mr. Wright, the prosecutor, said the DNA was irrelevant in this case and could have come from anywhere, including contamination. The Dechaine cause gained supporters after Mr. Moore's 2002 book, "Human Sacrifice." Mr. Moore said he attended an early Trial and Error meeting to defend law enforcement against allegations by people he assumed were "a bunch of nuts," but was instead inspired to investigate. His 450-page book, whose royalties go to Trial and Error, asserts, among other things, that the police failed to look at other suspects and that at the time of Sarah's death, Mr. Dechaine was being interviewed by the police in her disappearance. The book attracted people like Bill Bunting, 60, a cattle farmer and writer of maritime books, who has visited Mr. Dechaine "well over 100 times," and says "the only organization I ever belonged to before this was 4H." It also drew Nancy Farrin, 43, a state microbiologist and mother of two, who said that after visiting Mr. Dechaine, "I felt like this guy is either the supreme con artist of the century" or innocent. Other supporters include Dale Preston, who strangled his wife after finding her with another man, and met Mr. Dechaine in prison. And there is Morrison Bonpasse, whose other causes include the Lucy Stone League, which promotes the rights of women to keep their maiden names, and the Single Global Currency Association. He was the one who visited the Cherry family, he says to "encourage them to understand that their goals are similar to our goals: We want the killer of Sarah Cherry to be found and punished." Mr. Bonpasse said he was continuing to work for Mr. Dechaine's release. Trial and Error's members are so passionate that their voluminous Web site even draws connections between the Dechaine case and "The Shawshank Redemption," a Stephen King short story and movie about Andy Dufresne, wrongly imprisoned for his wife's murder. Among the similarities the Web site cites: that Mr. Dufresne was 31 and Mr. Dechaine was 30, that Mr. Dufresne said he was drunk at the time of the murder and Mr. Dechaine said he was on drugs, and that "both lived in Maine." In an interview from prison, Mr. Dechaine, 48, said: "Half the group believes that any press is good press, the other half believes that the less press the better. I guess I vacillate, to be honest with you."