Robert Dewey, 51, was freed last week after a joint motion to reverse his conviction was granted by a Mesa County, Colorado judge. A re-examination of DNA evidence in the rape and murder case exonerated Dewey and pointed to another man in prison for a similar crime. Dewey spent nearly 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
Dewey’s attorney, Danyel Joffe, gave credit to the Mesa County prosecutor, the attorney general’s office and law enforcement for agreeing to re-investigate the case. “It takes real character to stand up and say we made a mistake 17 years ago,” she said in court.
The investigation found that blood on Dewey’s work shirt from the day of the crime, originally linked to the victim, was actually only Dewey’s own blood. Also, semen found at the scene was retested and run through the national database where it was linked to another man already in prison for a 1989 rape and murder.
Dewey now faces the challenge of re-creating his life after 18 years in a prison cell. He joked about learning how to text, use a cell phone and computer saying, “Coming out of a shoebox into this, there’s a lot for me to catch up on.”
Read the article in the Denver Post here.