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DNA called infallible in proving innocence Neill is 3rd suspect locally to benefit By Jessica Smith of the Mail Tribune A Medford man who was wrongly accused of raping an Ashland woman is the third defendant in Jackson County to be cleared of such charges with DNA testing, which experts say can rule out suspects with absolute accuracy. "An exclusion is concrete in this business. This is just as powerful a tool as fingerprinting, if not more powerful," said Brad Popovich, director of the Oregon Health Sciences University Clinical Genetic Laboratory and a DNA expert who worked with prosecutors in the O.J. Simpson trial. So confident are experts in the infallibility of DNA testing when used to discount a suspect that the Jackson County district attorney's office announced Wednesday it would drop charges against James Jeffrey Neill, 47, who was arrested in the Nov. 3 Ashland rape. At the time, he lived in Talent. County officials on Monday learned that a sample of Neill's DNA -- deoxyribonucleic acid, the chemical carrier of genetic information found in the chromosomes of cells -- did not match that in a semen stain found on the 22-year-old rape victim's clothing. In 1991, a rape charge against a New York man was dismissed after DNA testing showed no match between him and a semen sample local police found at the crime scene. And in 1990, DNA testing cleared another suspect of a Jackson County rape charge. Nationally, at least 66 people have been released from prison in the past 14 years after DNA analysis proved they did not commit the alleged crimes, according to the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. "I don't think there's any question that DNA testing is accurate" when it excludes a suspect, Jackson County District Attorney Mark Huddleston said. At the state police crime lab in Portland, where Neill's DNA was analyzed, technicians created profiles based on the genetic characteristics found in Neill's sample and the semen stain from the rape victim's clothing. "Say you're looking at the results and you don't see genes coming from the suspect that match the sample. What's the chance that it could be the same person?" Popovich said. "The answer to that is zero. There's virtually no chance that nature could give that kind of result." The DNA tests performed by the state police showed Neill was not the rapist, Sgt. Gary Knowles said. "When Mark Huddleston was called on that, he could be assured that Neill wasn't the guy," Knowles added. But proving the guilt of a defendant can be more difficult, experts and others say. "DNA can be trusted to exclude someone, but I'm not sure how confident I am in how worthy it is to identify someone" as the perpetrator of the crime, said Lorenzo Mejia, the public defender assigned to Neill's case. The problem with most DNA tests, Mejia and others said, is that they don't completely rule out the possibility that someone other than the accused committed the crime. The tests instead offer statistics on the probability that the sample belongs to the accused -- the DNA in the sample matches the DNA of 1 in 10 million people, for instance. However, DNA analysis has linked crimes or identified suspects in more than 400 cases by matching crime scene evidence to the DNA of known convicts, the FBI said in its 1998 annual lab report. There are no statistics available on how many times DNA evidence has been used in Jackson County cases, Huddleston said. Although the DNA results cleared Neill in the rape case, he is facing a Jan. 26 trial for charges stemming from a separate harassment case. Mejia declined to comment on the status of either case. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA