Eva Gail Peterson was raped and murdered on May 4th, 1979 in front of her four year old son. Phillip Bivens and two other men were wrongly accused of the crime and was convicted. The exoneration of Dixon, Bivens, and Ruffin was made possible through the lawyers of the innocence project, the fact that there was no evidence pointing to their involvement, and the advantage of DNA testing.
The night of the murder Phillip Bivens had been on leave from a halfway house, where he was sent after stealing some beer from a store. The period of the crime was when the man was walking away from a halfway house (The National). A man was wrongly accused of rape and murder.
At the 1980 rape-murder trial, Dixon initially testified Ruffin raped Patterson and
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One point in time in May 1979, a man broke into a home owned by a Eva Gail then reaped and killed her. The result of breaking and entering for the man was that he raped and murdered Eva. Over the next few weeks, he gave several statements, contradictory on many points but all conforming to the same basic storyline: He had raped and killed Ms. Patterson, and he had acted alone. After some time, Ruffin said things that made him look like he was the only one involved in the crime. The statements made by Ruffin were pointing to the fact that he acted …show more content…
The DNA profile was run through the FBI’s DNA database. The profile from the crime scene excluded all three of the men convicted, and implicated another man who was convicted of raping another woman in her home in the same county two years later (Robertson). The end to their torment was made possible by lawyers of the Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) and co-counsel Rob McDuff.
A couple of years earlier, lawyers for the Innocence Project had received an application for help from Mr. Dixon through a corrections officer (Robertson). The lawyers, pointing to studies that show the frequency of false confessions, requested a DNA test of the evidence from the rape kit. The lawyers for the Innocence Project took action to help Mr. Dixon.
In conclusion, the setting free of these men meant everything to them even though it took decades. They were falsely imprisoned and were threatened to say things that connected them to the crime in order to be put in